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environment to enable refugee girls to recover from what they have seen and lived through’ ( Rigou, 2018 ). The intended beneficiaries of that healing and emancipatory strategy are African girls and young women (aged between 13 and 23) from countries such as Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan. Each year the RefuSHE initiative stages an annual fashion challenge in Chicago which brings together
Cold War, which is endangering both humanitarian teams and the operations they conduct. References to ‘before’ have been heard since the mid-1990s, in the wake of the Bosnian War and the Tutsi genocide. The mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda – coming on the heels of the Somali and Liberian civil wars – created a landscape of widespread violence, ‘anarchic conflicts’ in which not even humanitarian workers or journalists were safe. People stressed the contrast with earlier
participants for their time and involved participation. Laetitia Atlani-Duault gracefully provided comments on earlier drafts and guidance for further exploration. Gratitude is also owed to the editors of the special issue, and anonymous reviewers. An earlier draft was presented at the ‘Violences Extrêmes – Enquêter, secourir, juger – Syrie/Rwanda/RDC’ conference, organised by Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and CRASH. I thank organisers, other presenters and attendees
Creation of Human Capital ’, American Journal of Sociology , 94 : Supplement , S95 – S120 . Colletta , N. J. and Cullen , M. L. ( 2000 ), The Nexus between Violent Conflict, Social Capital and Social Cohesion: Case Studies from Cambodia and Rwanda ( Washington, DC : World Bank
along with a small number of refugees from Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda. Two-Tier Finance in Jordan A Broader Paradigm of Exclusion Jordan’s refugee policies have been shaped by the multiple waves of refugees it has received, including from Palestine (1948), Iraq (1979, 1991, 2003 and 2014–15) and Syria (2011–12) ( Lenner, 2020 ). Over time, refugees also arrived from Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and other African
earlier the United Nations and the ‘international community’ had been involved and had significantly failed to stop the conflict. I think that there is a sort of a reactive dimension which has been evoked later on in international interventions in Africa in relation to Somalia and Rwanda, for example. Namely that once the international community fails in one part of Africa, it tends to neglect the next conflict usually with disastrous consequences. Do you think there’s an
Throughout the 1990s, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was forced to face the challenges posed by the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis and a succession of major outbreaks of political violence in Rwanda and its neighbouring countries. Humanitarian workers were confronted with the execution of close to one million people, tens of thousands of casualties pouring into health centres, the flight of millions of others who had sought refuge in camps and a series of deadly epidemics. Where and in what circumstances were the MSF teams deployed? What medical and non-medical assistance were they able to deliver? Drawing on various hitherto unpublished private and public archives, this book recounts the experiences of the MSF teams working in the field. It also describes the tensions (and cooperation) between international humanitarian agencies, the crucial negotiations conducted at local, national and international level and the media campaigns. The messages communicated to the public by MSF’s teams bear witness to diverse practical, ethical and political considerations. How to react when humanitarian workers are first-hand witnesses to mass crimes? How to avoid becoming accomplices to criminal stratagems? How to deliver effective aid in situations of extreme violence?
This book is intended for humanitarian aid practitioners, students, journalists and researchers with an interest in genocide and humanitarian studies and the political sociology of international organisations.
The book uses a case study of the British response to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 to understand what factors motivate the decision to intervene in humanitarian crises overseas; it is primarily a study of British politics, especially under Conservative Governments, rather than a study of the genocide itself. The book begins with a review of the general literature on humanitarian intervention and a brief description of the background to the genocide. It then moves on to focus on the British response; the research uses interviews with ministers and senior civil servants and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act to explore and explain the Government’s response. It also explores in some depth the response of the British media, public, NGOs and Parliament and considers how these various actors influence government policy making. The research demonstrates that intervention only becomes likely when three factors are present: first there must be a realisation that a humanitarian crisis exists; secondly, to overcome bureaucratic inertia there must be support for intervention at the most senior levels of government; and there must be a belief that intervention will be successful. In the final chapter, the book then tests this conclusion by reviewing the British response to the contemporary crises in Libya and Syria.
8 Display, concealment and ‘culture’: the disposal of bodies in the 1994 Rwandan genocide Nigel Eltringham Introduction In their ethnography of violent conflict, ‘cultures of terror’ 1 and genocide, anthropologists have recognized that violence is discursive. The victim’s body is a key vehicle of that discourse. In contexts of inter-ethnic violence, for example, ante-mortem degradation and/or post-mortem mutilation are employed to transform the victim’s body into a representative example of the ethnic category, the manipulation of the body enabling the
Mass violence is one of the defining phenomena of the twentieth century, which some have even called the 'century of genocides'. The study of how the dead body is treated can lead us to an understanding of the impact of mass violence on contemporary societies. Corpses of mass violence and genocide, especially when viewed from a biopolitical perspective, force one to focus on the structures of the relations between all that participates in the enfolding case study. Argentina is an extraordinary laboratory in the domain of struggle against impunity and of 'restoration of the truth'. It constitutes a useful paradigm in the context of reflection on the corpses of mass violence. Its special character, in the immediate aftermath of the military dictatorship, is to test almost the entirety of juridical mechanisms in the handling of state crimes. The trigger for both the intercommunal violence and the civil war was the mass murders by the Ustaša. This book discusses the massacres carried out by the Ustaša in Croatia during the Second World War. After a brief presentation of the historical background, the massacres carried out by the Ustaša militia and their corpse disposal methods are described. Using Rwanda as a case study, the book proposes an agenda for ethnographic research to explore the relationship between concealment and display in contexts of genocide. This relationship is explored in detail after a discussion of the historical background to the 1994 genocide.