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security frameworks – and the Hobbesian social contract underpinning them – more profoundly apparent than regarding the stateless: refugees and asylum-seekers in global politics. Refugees and asylum-seekers point both to the failure of some states to live up to their obligations of providing for the wellbeing of their populations, and to the ultimate inability for traditional
In 1995, the leaders of the Tutsi genocide had free reign in Zaire and set about marshalling their partisans in the refugee camps. Embarking on a combat strategy, they launched increasingly frequent and murderous incursions into Rwanda where they targeted civilians. In October and November 1996, the RPA, with the help of Zairian rebels, destroyed all the camps set up in North
When hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees began flooding into Tanzania and Zaire in the spring and summer of 1994, MSF’s management and field teams had two reasons to be concerned. Mortality rates in the vast camps set up in Tanzania and then Zaire were indeed catastrophically high at first. Before April 1994, it had taken several months for humanitarian organisations
Scholars and practitioners alike have identified interventions on behalf of Armenians as watersheds in the history of humanitarianism. This volume reassesses these claims, critically examining a range of interventions by governments, international and diasporic organisations and individuals that aimed to bring ‘aid to Armenia’. Drawing on perspectives from a range of disciplines, the chapters trace the history of these interventions from the 1890s to the present, paying particular attention to the aftermaths of the Genocide and the upheavals of the post-Soviet period. Geographically, they connect diverse spaces, including the Caucasus, Russia and the Middle East, Europe, North America and South America, and Australia, revealing shifting transnational networks of aid and intervention. These chapters are followed by reflections by leading scholars in the fields of refugee history and Armenian history, Professor Peter Gatrell and Professor Ronald Grigor Suny, respectively.
This book provides a unique perspective on the Allied bombing of France during the Second World War which killed around 57,000 French civilians. Using oral history as well as archival research, it provides an insight into children's wartime lives in which bombing often featured prominently, even though it has slipped out of French collective memory. The book compares three French towns with different experiences of bombing: Boulogne-Billancourt , Brest, and Lille. Divided into three parts dealing with expectations, experiences and explanations of bombing, the book considers the child's view of wartime violence, analysing resilience, understanding and trauma. The first part of the book deals with the time before bombing. It examines how the French prepared for war and preparations made specifically for bombing, showing how state-level and municipal-level preparations. The second part considers the time during bombing and its aftermath. It discusses the experience of being bombed, examining children's practical, sensory and emotional responses. The fascinating and frightening scenes in the immediate aftermath of bombing that made lasting impressions on children, including destruction, chaos and encounters with violent, public death. Changes in status as a result of bombing becoming a sinistre, refugee or evacuee had far-reaching consequences in some children's lives, affecting their education and economic situation. The last section looks at the way in which air raids were explained to the French population. It considers the propaganda that criticised and defended the Allies, and an understanding of the history of Vichy.
v v The consequences of bombing Yvette Chapalain: I’ve got some bad memories of those years, which still upset me a bit. It was just that we didn’t have any choice, but were sent away to these other schools where we weren’t made very welcome by the other children, the children who lived there. We were ‘the refugees’. We were sent to the centre of Finistère. Even though it was a Catholic school, eh! Us, ‘the refugees’. The children who lived there lived with their parents, lots of them farmers. And they were spoilt. They had good bread, pancakes, things like
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.
This book focuses on the paradoxical character of law and specifically concerns the structural violence of law as the political imposition of normative order onto a "lawless" condition. The paradox of law which grounds and motivates Christoph Menke's intervention is that law is both the opposite of violence and, at the same time, a form of violence. The book develops its engagement with the paradox of law in two stages. The first shows why, and in what precise sense, the law is irreducibly characterized by structural violence. The second explores the possibility of law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence and, hence, of the form of a self-critique of law in view of its own violence. The Book's philosophical claims are developed through analyses of works of drama: two classical tragedies in the first part and two modern dramas in the second part. It attempts to illuminate the paradoxical nature of law by way of a philosophical interpretation of literature. There are at least two normative orders within the European ethical horizon that should be called "legal orders" even though they forego the use of coercion and are thus potentially nonviolent. These are international law and Jewish law. Understanding the relationship between law and violence is one of the most urgent challenges a postmodern critical legal theory faces today. Self-reflection, the philosophical concept that plays a key role in the essay, stands opposed to all forms of spontaneity.
, in much the same way that prisoners of war and their families provoked a broad charitable response. Donations and condolences flooded into bombed towns from across France and its empire. The government tried to co-opt this goodwill, translating it into the National Revolution’s language of duty and sacrifice. While charitable giving could be put down to duty and sacrifice, it must also be seen as compassion and generosity of individuals towards strangers. But solidarity worked best at a distance. When refugees arrived in quiet villages, eventually generosity wore
newsreels and in illustrated magazines. Spain’s prominent v 60 v Expecting war role in the controversies that crippled the Popular Front government and the influx of 460,000 Spanish refugees into France made this conflict highly visible.31 Max Potter’s father was a Daily Mail journalist in Paris, and this exposed him to current affairs. Spain was in the press, but so was Abyssinia, which, he recalled, ‘I remember seeing, even at seven years old’. The photographs in illustrated magazines brought new knowledge. At nine years old, Robert Belleuvre and his friends were