A Review of “Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe”

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 120-121
Author(s):  
Abena Ampofoa Asare
Keyword(s):  
World War ◽  
Rwandan Genocide

Genocidal Politics and Racialization of Intervention: From Rwanda to Darfur and Beyond

2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 513-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shedrack C. Agbakwa
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
United Nations ◽  
International Community ◽  
World War ◽  
Rwandan Genocide ◽  
Legal Duty ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
United Nations System ◽  
Nations System

Last year marked the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide when more than 800,000 people were slaughtered within 100 days under the watch of the international community. As the United Nations has since acknowledged, “[t]he international community did not prevent the genocide, nor did it stop the killing once the genocide had begun.” The whole world failed the victims – a failure the UN Report called a fundamental “failure of the international community [and] failure of the United Nations system as a whole.” Those who could did little or nothing to help. Indeed, some actively concealed or denied the unfolding genocide. Interestingly, the genocide took place more than half a century after the victorious allies of World War II vowed “Never Again!” to genocide in response to the Nazi holocaust. Also, by 1994 the 1948Convention on the Punishment and the Prevention of the Crime of Genocideunder which states assumed a legal duty to prevent and punish the crime of genocide was nearly half a century old.

States and Ethnic Violence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Lange
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethnic Violence ◽  
World War ◽  
Rwandan Genocide ◽  
Role Of The State

This chapter examines the role of the state in promoting or deterring ethnic violence. It begins with a discussion of the ways states can promote ethnic violence by using a number of examples, including the Rwandan genocide and statelessness/near-statelessness during World War II. It then considers how both the ethnicization of states and state effectiveness help explain why some states contribute to ethnic violence more than others through a comparative analysis of ethnic violence in two Indian regions: Assam and Kerala. It also explores how states affect whether mobilizational resources can be effectively employed to organize ethnic violence. Finally, it shows how modernity promotes some states that are willing and able to prevent ethnic violence and others that are willing and able to incite it.

Paper Witnesses

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-204
Author(s):  
Alison James
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
First Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Rwandan Genocide ◽  
Hybrid Approaches ◽  
Narrative Reconstruction ◽  
A Site ◽  
Simultaneous Identification

This chapter traces the emergence of a literature of testimony in the years following World War II. However, this new tendency does not immediately reshape the literary field, which was dominated in the 1950s and 1960s by the (mostly) anti-documentary approach of the nouveau roman. Later, however, the document becomes central to explorations of the national past. In Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur (1985) and Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997/1999), the “found text” is a figure of the personal and cultural repressed, before becoming a site of simultaneous identification and separation. Written traces set in motion a quest for the past, while narrative reconstruction aims to restore immediacy to the personal archive (as in Duras’s war notebooks), or to point to intimate truths beyond the impersonality and violence of the bureaucratic record (as in the documents collected by Modiano). In the wake of these experiments and at the turn of the twenty-first century, French and Francophone works alike experiment with documentary or hybrid approaches to historical trauma—especially in cases where fictionalization is perceived to be ethically risky, such as the Rwandan genocide.

Milo Rau in Africa

Theater ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-61
Author(s):  
Piet Defraeye
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
International Institute ◽  
World War ◽  
Rwandan Genocide ◽  
Personal Connection ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Many

Piet Defraeye explores Milo Rau’s work in Central Africa, focusing on 2011’s Hate Radio and 2015’s The Congo Tribunal. Defraeye suggests that while Rau’s interest in Central Africa is not based on any personal connection, it began before the founding of his company, the International Institute of Political Murder (iipm), and has been something of a through line for the director. In analyzing both projects, Defraeye traces their development and provides the historical and cultural context of the events presented. In the case of Hate Radio, this involves looking at performances of the piece around Europe and on-site in a radio studio in Kigali and explaining the role of radio in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. With The Congo Tribunal, Defraeye identifies several of the many global ramifications of what is often referred to as the African World War and summarizes the three cases that made up the three-day imagined trial in Bukavu, Congo, which, along with the follow-up presentation in Berlin and a wide range of ancillary materials, was the centerpiece of the project. Defraeye contextualizes The Congo Tribunal within both Rau’s oeuvre and the larger ecosystem of Central African activism, identifying Rau’s utopian goals as well as the criticisms leveled against him.

scholarly journals Mass Killing

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Chao
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Mass Killing ◽  
World War ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Rwandan Genocide ◽  
Lethal Violence ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World

Mass killing (often carried out in the form of genocide) offends the sensibilities of many people around the world. It is considered a “crime against humanity,” such is its barbarity and ruthlessness. When it occurs, the question often asked by both victims and bystanders is, “Why?” I argue in this paper that mass killing is not, as is often portrayed, the result of primal bloodlust or racism. Through an examination of the Third Punic War, the Boer War, World War II, and the Rwandan genocide, I show that mass killing is actually carried out as a rational means to a political end; that is, it is simply politics by other means. If mass killing is a combination of politics and lethal violence, however, can it be called war? I argue that mass killing, while bearing similarities to and often occurring simultaneously as warfare, is nonetheless different from war because it does not require multiple sides actively fighting each other, as war does.

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