Suchergebnisse

Dominant theories of mass violence hold that strategic concerns in civil war drive the deliberate targeting of civilians. However, the causal mechanisms that link strategic objectives to large-scale violence against civilians remain underspecified, and as such the causal logics that underpin each remain blurred. In this article, we identify and explicate four plausible mechanisms that explain why armed groups would target, for strategic purposes, civilians in war. We then turn to the peak period of violence during the Guatemalan armed conflict to assess which mechanisms were most prevalent. Specifically, we leverage unique archival data: 359 pages of military files from Operation Sofía, a month-long counterinsurgent campaign waged in the northwestern Ixil region. Through process tracing of real-time internal communications, we find that state actors most commonly described the civilian population as loyal to rebel forces; violence against civilians was a means to weaken the insurgency. Troops on the ground also depicted the Ixil population as 'winnable', which suggests that security forces used violence in this period to shape civilian behavior. These findings are most consistent with the idea that mass violence in this case and period was a coercive instrument to defeat insurgents by punishing civilians for collaboration. The evidence from this period is less consistent with a logic of genocide, in which the purpose of violence would be to destroy 'unwinnable' civilian groups. Our analysis illustrates how a mechanism-centered approach based on process tracing of conflict archives can help uncover logics underlying civilian killing.

Intro -- Contents -- Introduction: Embracing Paradox: Human Rights in the Global Age - Steve J. Stern and Scott Straus -- Part I. Who Makes Human Rights? -- 1. Human Rights History from the Ground Up: The Case of East Timor - Geoffrey Robinson -- 2. Rights on Display: Museums and Human Rights Claims - Bridget Conley-Zilkic -- 3. Civilian Agency in Times of Crisis: Lessons from Burundi - Meghan Foster Lynch -- Part II. Interrogating Classic Concepts -- 4. Consulting Survivors: Evidence from Cambodia, Northern Uganda, and Other Countries Affected by Mass Violence - Patrick Vinck and Phuong N. Pham -- 5. "Memoria, Verdad y Justicia": The Terrain of Post-Dictatorship Social Reconstruction and the Struggle for Human Rights in Argentina - Noa Vaisman -- 6. The Paradoxes of Accountability: Transitional Justice in Peru - Jo-Marie Burt -- Part III. New Horizons -- 7. The Aporias of New Technologies for Human Rights Activism - Fuyuki Kurasawa -- 8. The Human Right to Water in Rural India: Promises and Challenges - Philippe Cullet -- 9. A Very Promising Species: From Hobbes to the Human Right to Water - Richard P. Hiskes -- Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Index.

"Changing Patterns of Political Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa" published on by Oxford University Press.

Preventing large‐scale atrocities has emerged as an important policy goal of the post–Cold War period. However, a debate exists about the effects of creating an international institution to prevent atrocities. Advocates of intervention argue that a credible threat to intervene should deter perpetrators and stop atrocities when deterrence fails. Critics argue that third‐party intervention, by strengthening weak minority groups and lowering the cost of war, encourages rebellions and so makes war and atrocities more likely. We develop a model of intervention to analyze this debate. The model shows that the negative effects of intervention highlighted by critics can be mitigated if the third party is relatively neutral and if alternative costs are imposed on decision makers. We conclude that with appropriate institutional design, the net impact of stronger third‐party commitments to end atrocities will be to lower the expected level of atrocities.

Based on military intervention by France and the UN in April 2011, the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo was removed from office, paving the way for Alassane Outtara, the widely recognized winner of the November 2010 presidential elections, to claim office. But the French and UN action had another effect: it triggered commentary and outrage about international interference -- in particularly on the part of France -- in African affairs. Adapted from the source document.

In her work, the South African photographer Jo Ractliffe has been exploring the idea of landscape as "pathology," how past violence manifests in the landscape of the present. In 2007, she made the first of a number of visits to Angola and over the following 4 years photographed the lingering end of Angola's civil war, one that South Africa was deeply involved in and was known to White South Africans as the South Africa's "Border War." For Violence: An international journal, she has come back on her wide body of work and shared her thoughts on the difficulties to grasp violence visually, the ethics of representation and the ways in which photography exercises one's critical awareness.