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, with an idea of addressing some of the underlying causes, very much the Anglo-American approach. Whereas the francophone approach was much more grounded in the cri du coeur , a moral outrage being expressed. Professionalization and bureaucratization of the organization pushed us to have a logical framework – with goals and targets – to be effective. One sphere was linked to abuses of power, violence against civilians, etc.; the other sphere was a more generic defense of humanitarian law and principles, like ‘don’t bomb hospitals’ and that kind of thing. VG: It
Commissioner of Human Rights, ‘Democratic Republic of Congo, 1993–2003: Report of the Mapping Exercise documenting the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed within the territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003’, Geneva: OHCHR, August 2010, www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/CD/DRC_MAPPING_REPORT_FINAL_EN.pdf (accessed 21 February 2019). 3 Most notable is Reyntjens (2013) who provides a detailed chronicle of abuses of power by the RPF, including human rights abuses. 4
(1991–2002) was the culmination of decades of alienation and socio-economic exclusion, and rebel factions directed their anger at representatives of the ‘rotten system’, including chiefs, as symbols of abuses of power and the marginalisation of youth ( Peters, 2011 ; Richards, 1996 ). Questions of legitimacy resurfaced after the war as heated debates emerged around the reconstitution of the chieftaincy. Despite pre-war abuses, populations nevertheless
subject of other chapters in this book, the chapter would not be complete without at least a brief look at the period since the end of the First World War. This saw the most egregious abuse of power on the part of Nazi Germany and then a new Germany, the Federal Republic, resolutely turning its back on anything that might look like an open, let alone self-seeking exercise of power and clinging to this attitude even after the reunification of Germany in 1989. Germany and its princes in the ancien régime It may serve our purpose best if we assume ‘power’ to mean
American abuses of power. And it has a potential influence also on Russia and China. But all this depends upon Europe acting cohesively, and gaining and keeping its moral leadership. In the longer run only a cohesive European effort to promote globally its new value system offers a hope of influencing the US to develop similar values. The same is true in relation to Russia and, eventually, China. And time is running against Europe. On present form, within forty years demography will have reduced Europe’s workforce by one-quarter. Economic growth cannot be sustained
the less meaning it has as a concept, becoming merely a byword for cruelty and the abuse of power. This is to introduce the worst kind of postmodernism into the heart of social life, enacting the dystopic vision of Jean Baudrillard who argued in 1981 that societies were becoming hostage to a process of ‘substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real
’s corrupting influences. Rousseau ( 1950a , p. 279) claims that under the impact of property people’s souls and passions ‘gradually deteriorate until they can almost be said to have changed their nature’. Godwin ( 1985 , p. 436) writes that the accumulation of property is always attended by abuse of power, capricious politics, personal convenience and pecuniary corruption. Marx and Engels argue that under the influence of private property, people become alienated from their true selves (Mészáros 1970 ). In sum, people are only potentially rational, and their potentialities
conflict that are to some extent ignited by the abuse of power within the socio-political structural context. It is the desire and need to belong, or more simply to be, that leads to group differences in society and this can give rise to a situation of conflict and the desire for protection. Belonging, therefore, can be a source of conflict because by definition it indulges in denial and repression and because it sets up
, yet weak enough to prevent abuse of power? Ethical forces alone could not control human ambition. However, a complex system of checks and balances could be constructed in which ‘ambition would be made to counter ambition’ (Madison 1987 ). This would limit government and preserve an equilibrium of power. The 1776 Declaration of Independence is optimistic and revolutionary. The 1787 Constitution is pessimistic and conservative. It does not secure a good government as much as it seeks to avert the tyranny of a powerful state. What could explain the source
social research should unveil the mechanisms of repression, disclose practices of privilege and oppose the abuse of power. Post-structuralist arguments even sharpened the old left-wing diagnosis that the social-science ideal had been subverted by modern, positivist research methods (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979 [1944]). Post-structuralists maintained that positivist science twisted our perceptions and captured social-science research in an alien, technical discourse that did not serve insight and knowledge as much as it served the views of established elites (Rousseau