In April 1994 Rwanda encountered the most gruesome political conflict, which was widely motivated by decades of ethnic tension, and resulted in the massive participation of ordinary Hutus slaughtering Tutsis, who are a minority along with the so-called moderate Hutus. Large numbers of ordinary Rwandans became killers, some willingly and some by force. About one million Rwandans, mostly Tutsis, lost their lives during the killings. Hence this historic event was declared to be genocide. The post-genocide government of Paul Kagame has been faced with the mission not only to reconcile the nation but also to forge a justice system that will assure Rwandans and those who committed crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity will be punished appropriately. It is outmost important to note that emphasis on justice in cases such as Rwandan genocide might be seen to be most desirable to victims in particular. This idea can be more dangerous particularly if the process takes place in an atmosphere which is characterised by political environment which is oppressive and autocratic. Realising the complexity of the conflict and inability of the conventional justice system to in dealing with the massive cases of people alleged to have participated in the killings or committed crime of genocide. The victims impatiently sought not only justice but answers to what has happened to their loved ones. On the other hand those labeled as perpetrators also wanted to clear their names since some of them believed that they were wrongfully accused and the process was taking too long. The Rwandan government was left with no option and decided to reintroduce the traditional justice system called the Gacaca. The Gacaca system was not only pioneered to render justice to the victims and those wrongfully accused but to reconcile as well as bring peace to the Rwandan society. This study is therefore aimed at providing a comprehensive and compelling explanation of the process and the operations of the Gacaca tribunals. Thus by means of both historical and empirical analysis, the study hopes to determine the challenges confronting the system and the promise it holds, if any, and to recommend the need to adopt and adapt to an approach which is wider and more integrated in dealing with reconciliation in the region. To accomplish this study, data was predominantly sourced from primary sources such as media reports and personal interviews with Rwandan community living in Durban, South Africa. The study revealed that the Rwandan genocide was marked by overwhelming public participation which makes Rwandan conflict even more complex. Killing was seen as work, as well as fulfilling the country's duty. On the other hand not killing was viewed as betrayal especially for thousands of peasants. Almost the entire population took part in the killings. The Gacaca is a unique approach of trying genocide perpetrators adopted in Rwanda. In this thesis I argue that it is through examination of different historical and social factors that the relevance of the Gacaca can be assessed. Furthermore my argument is that Rwanda needs a multi-faceted approach to confront complex problems that it faces politically and socially. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

Išsilaisvinus iš sovietų okupacijos, Lietuvos įstatymų leidėjai į šalies teisinę sistemą inkorporavo konvencijos Dėl kelio užkirtimo genocido nusikaltimui ir baudimo už jį nuostatas. Be to, siekiant nubausti asmenis, kaltus už okupacijos metu vykdytus nusikaltimus, į genocido apibrėžimą buvo įtrauktos taip pat politinės bei socialinės grupės. Tačiau toks Lietuvos įstatymų leidėjų žingsnis praplėtė tarptautinėje teisėje įtvirtintą genocido apibrėžimą, kuriame numatoma, jog genocidu siekiama visiškai ar iš dalies sunaikinti nacionalinę, etninę, rasinę ar religinę grupę, taigi ne politinę ar socialinę grupę. Pagal tarptautinės teisės principą nullum crimen sine lege niekas negali būti baudžiamas už nusikaltimą, kuris jo darymo metu nebuvo draudžiamas įstatymu. Šiame darbe siekiama nustatyti ar Lietuvos teisinėje sistemoje įtvtirtintas išplėstinis genocido sudėties apibrėžimas nepažeidžia principo nullum crimen sine lege. Darbą sudaro trys pagrindinės dalys, kuriose atskleidžiami nagrinėjamos problemos teoriniai bei praktiniai aspektai. Pirmojoje dalyje nagrinėjamas genocido apibrėžimas, priežastys kodėl politinės ir socialinės grupės nebuvo įtrauktos į Genocido konvenciją bei analizuojama kitų šalių praktika apibrėžiant genocido veiką. Politinės ir socialinės grupės į konvenciją nebuvo įtrauktos dėl politinių priežasčių, iškilus tam tikrų šalių prieštaravimams. Tačiau Lietuva ne vienintelė įtraukė šias grupes į savo įstatymus, tai rodo, kad ne vien Lietuvai svarbi šių grupių... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Genocide is described as one of the most severe crimes of the international law. After the Second World War international community decided to codify international law and the general principles of the law recognized by civilized nations. The United Nations enacted The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention stated that genocide crime is described as acts against national, ethnic, racial or religious group. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many countries including Lithuania got back their independence. Lithuania’s legislators incorporated the norms of the Genocide convention into the state’s legal system. Besides these norms legislators also included social and political groups into the definition of genocide crime. It was done in order to punish persons, who were responsible for the criminal offense against Lithuania’s citizen during soviet occupation. The decision that states legislators made extended the definition of genocide crime established in international law, which defines genocide as the acts against national, ethnic, racial or religious group, but not against social or political group. Under international principle nullum crimen sine lege a person should not face criminal punishment except for an act that was criminalized by law before he performed the act. In this work it is aimed to determine whether the extended genocide structure established in Lithuanian legal system does not violate principle nullum... [to full text]

This research discusses communication and meaning in the context of orality, using a variety of theoretical perspectives, including memory theory, media and communication theory, and semiotics. Drawing on the work of Walter Ong, it provides new insight about the characteristics and limits of oralnarration by assessing the memes, tropes, and phraseological units in the oral narrations of Armenian Genocide survivors. This research identifies a list of replicable forms of stories and oral devices that are used by the group in question; it then proposes that oral narration of non-fictional topics designed to convey historical or episodic information to others is intuitive, reactive, directed, fuzzy, and sticky. Concerns about the legitimacy and historical value of the narrations under review do not play a role in this research; instead, the focal point is the meaning embedded in the form and structure of the narrations under study.

Mental health has been receiving increasing amounts of attention in recent years. Despite this, there are still many barriers to receiving mental health care in all parts of the world. Post-conflict countries have the dual challenge of increased mental health problems among their populations and trying to respond to these problems with low resources as their economies are often destroyed by the effects of war. This research studies the implementation of Rwanda’s post-genocide mental health policy to assess the challenges and best practises of implementing mental health reform in a low-resource, post-conflict country. The thesis found that the implementation of Rwanda’s mental health policy has relied on policies of rapid decentralization and integration to increase accessibility to mental health care. Decentralization has ensured that mental health services are available at every level and relies on a referral system. Mental health care is integrated into the general healthcare system by training generalists in hospitals and health centres to respond to mental health issues, therefore making these services available at nearly all health institutions. These policies were viewed positively by stakeholders, but there were still many gaps and challenges in the implementation of Rwanda’s mental health policy. One of the major challenges was stigma acting as a barrier to accessing services while one of the largest gaps was that the implementation relies too much on institutionalized, individualized, and Westernized care, which participants pointed out is not always suitable in the Rwandan context. Recommendations included an increase in sensitization campaigns, shifting towards community-based mental health care, expanding personnel and services, as well as increasing funding. The analysis, relying on complexity theory, found that many of the gaps are missed by the government because of a lack of collaboration with local organizations and service providers working in the domain.

No description available.

In 1994 a brutal genocide took place in Rwanda were one part of the population killed over 800 000 of their own people over a period of one hundred days. Rwandan radio, the biggest and most influential medium in the country, played a crucial part in the tragedy and today, almost 22 years after the genocide, Rwanda is trying to rebuild the media system as well as the trust between the public and the journalists. Over recent years Rwanda has made a huge development within the media sector and keeps moving forward from its dark history. This study aims to examine how radio journalist at the government owned radio channel RBA, Rwanda Broadcasting Agency, experiences the changes in the media climate and focus will mainly lie on the period after the introduction of new media laws in 2013. This study also examines how journalists have experienced different international collaborations, especially between Western countries and Rwanda, that are aiming to develop the media system. In total eleven radio journalist from RBA were interviewed and our research questions were as follows; How do Rwandan radio journalists within the RBA experience the media situation in the country today? How do Rwandan radio journalists within the RBA regard their role within their profession? How can Rwanda’s media climate be interpreted through different normative media systems? To understand the media climate at RBA three theoretical perspectives were used as a base; Agenda Setting Theory, globalisation and domestication. To study the media situation an ethnographic method was applied and put into the context of Rwanda's history and culture. During our interviews we have talked about how the journalists regard their role in the society, how it has changed, what may still change, how they value their independency as journalists and what they think the future holds for Rwandan media development. The informants all agreed that Rwandan journalism is constantly developing and journalists are learning how to work in a society where the media's biggest aim is to be trusted by the public. Rwandan journalists and international journalists, the latter group also partly represented in the study, regard Rwanda's media situation differently but both parts agree upon the fact that the country has a long way to go to reach an open media climate. Our result leads up to a cultural conclusion; it is difficult to make a fair judgement of the media situation in Rwanda only by measuring the country's development and the journalistic competence according to Western ideals.

This thesis seeks to provide an account of the role played by ideologies in acts of mass violence against civilians, such as genocides, murderous state repression, war crimes, and other ‘atrocities’. Mass violence of this kind has already received extensive study, with scholars frequently emphasising their belief that ideology is important. Until now, however, discussions of ideology have been held back by a lack of conceptual and theoretical development, leading to narrow portrayals of ideology’s role, vagueness over its relevance, and dubious assumptions about its theoretical implications. This thesis addresses these problems by building a more focused and integrative theoretical framework for analysing the ideological dynamics of atrocities. I engage in an extensive conceptual and methodological discussion, to establish the best way of defining and utilising the concept of ideology. In doing so, I emphasise how ideology can be important even for that majority of atrocity perpetrators who do not meet classic but misleading stereotypes of fanatical killers driven by burning hatred. I then detail my actual account of the ideological dynamics of deadly atrocities, which centres around the identification of six ‘justificatory mechanisms’: dehumanisation, guilt-attribution, threat-construction, deagentification, virtuetalk, and future-bias. These justificatory mechanisms describe sets of ideological processes that recur across different cases of violence against civilians, and which make that violence look permissible or even desirable to those who, in a variety of roles, carry it out. I then substantiate this account through three case studies: of Nazi atrocities, Stalinist oppression, and Allied area bombing in World War II. These cases demonstrate the cross-case applicability of the six justificatory mechanisms, and illustrate how the framework I offer allows us to construct more causally explicit, psychologically plausible, and comprehensive pictures of the way key ideologies feed in to the most destructive campaigns of violence against civilians.

This dissertation argues that Black mothering is the re-creation of Black sociability in the African Diaspora in the face of the ways in which genocide attempts to eliminate black existence. Therefore, I argue for an approach to African Diaspora as creating, nurturing, resisting, and recuperative acts as an alternative to genocidal practices, which constitutes black mothering. Concerning genocidal practices, this dissertation focuses mainly on anti-black violence, specifically male-on-male and state-sponsored violence; although with an understanding that genocide also manifests itself through many other ways. The choice to focus on male-on-male and state violence is because I understand them as being the ultimate alternative to put forward genocidal ideologies when others fail. Thus, understanding the violent killing of the black population as the most visible expression of genocide in the African Diaspora, I want to confront them with their alternative, which is the given social, cultural, and biological significance of motherhood, i.e., to generate and nurture life. Therefore, my ethnographic project explores Black mothers’ experiences of violence in Rio de Janeiro’s poorest areas. Their struggle to survive encompasses not only their own fight against poverty, racism, patriarchy, and gender discrimination but also entails the consequences of violent acts perpetrated or facilitated by the state upon their families. Engaging with the analytical concept of Outraged Mothering, this dissertation builds bridges between African Diaspora Studies and the Anthropology of Emotions by applying a Black Feminist perspective in order to perceive Black mothers’ social-political insertion in society as well as their pedagogies of resistance. My research methods include participant observation, semi-structured interviews, oral histories, and documentary photography conducted in an extended period of seventeen months of fieldwork research between 2011 and 2012. This project embraces activism as a learning experience in the collaboration with the mothers in struggle, and employs auto-ethnography as a way to think critically through the researcher’s emotions while conducting and writing the project. This project aims to enhance developing literature on Black motherhood in Brazil and explores Black lives in the African Diaspora through an analytical framework that presents emotion as a catalytic stimulus for the rise of radical political projects. / text

<p>This dissertation examines the conflict in Eastern Anatolia in the early 20th century and the memory politics around it. It shows how discourses of victimhood have been engines of grievance that power the politics of fear, hatred and competing, exclusionary claims to statehood and territory by Turks, Armenians, and Kurds. Grounded in extensive archival research in American, British, Turkish, and Armenian historical repositories, I trace how discourses of communal victimhood were generated around the traumatic ordeals in the two decades that preceded the Armenian genocide of 1915-6, carried out by the Young Turk government. The dissertation pays special attention to the nature of political tension and debate among Armenians on the eve of the genocide as well as rethinking the events and later interpretations of the iconic Armenian uprising in the Ottoman city of Van in 1915. The analysis here goes beyond deterministic, escalationist and teleological perspectives on the antecedents of the Armenian genocide; instead, it highlights political agency and enabling structures of the war, offering a new perspective on the tragic violence of Eastern Anatolia in the early 20th century.</p> / Dissertation

In the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, one of the critical elements of the ethnic cleansing regimes was rape and impregnation of women. When the international justice system was created to criminally try the perpetrators of the atrocities, including the rape victims was a new development. Looking at the tribunals and court system from a gendered perspective reveals that the efforts to include rape victims have not taken into account their specific needs, stemming from their trauma. A critical look the ICTY and other criminal courts are presented, as well as recommendations for improving inclusivity and reconciliation.