BY RICARDO F. VIVANCOS PÉREZ In spring 2011, massive protests in Mexico and Spain placed youth center stage in the Hispanic world.1 In Mexico, non-violent demonstrations against drug-related violence, corruption, and impunity—organized by the Movimiento Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (MPJD)2—included a silent protest in Mexico City on May 8, and the Caravana del Consuelo or [...]
BY ARNAUD KURZE Throughout the 1990s the state of Yugoslavia dissolved, ravaged by horrendous conflicts across the region. Since, several retributive and restorative mechanisms to cope with past atrocities have been attempted. Only a few years ago, a regional fact-finding project was launched by several established human rights organizations in the area. Currently, this so [...]
BY CARLOS SLUZKI Internally displaced people (IDP), estimated at over 27 million individuals according to United Nations data (UNHCR 2010), are a byproduct of political violence or warfare not only in Sudan, Colombia, or Iraq (which are the three areas with the largest IDP population), but also in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Democratic [...]
BY JOHN G. DALE The United Nations (UN) established the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002 to indict, try, and sentence individuals who commit any of four crimes, including war crimes or crimes against humanity. Although neither the United States nor Myanmar are currently signatories to the Rome Statute that created the authority and jurisdiction [...]
BY MARK GOODALE It is unsettling how an experience can rapidly shift from the incongruous to the profoundly moving, from a moment of surprise to the realization that one’s frame of reference, which has been put in place only with great difficulty, is no longer quite so adequate. So there I was, halfway through a [...]
BY HUGH GUSTERSON In the fall of 2007, I received an interview request from the New York Times journalist David Rohde, who was writing an article about the U.S. Army’s newly announced Human Terrain project – a program to embed anthropologists in military teams in Iraq and Afghanistan and send them out to “map the [...]
BY JO-MARIE BURT In spring 2008, the Transitional/Transnational Justice Working Group, a group of Mason faculty and graduate students interested in issues of global justice and human rights, launched the Human Rights, Global Justice and Democracy Project. The project’s central concern is to examine how societies that experienced mass atrocity cope with the legacies of [...]
BY MARK DRUMBL Several African atrocities have become judicialized internationally. Cases include Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uganda. An ad hoc tribunal created by the United Nations Security Council, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), prosecutes individuals suspected of high-level involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. A hybrid (mixed) [...]
BY STEPHEN A. LAMONY Over the past two decades, Uganda has witnessed an increasing number of fundamental discussions on accountability for mass human rights atrocities at the local and national level. Interestingly, however, there has never been any local form of criminal prosecutions for grave human rights violations. To explain this reality, one has to [...]
DAVID BACKER INTRODUCTION The last 65 years have exhibited competing currents and ongoing debate with regards to accountability for human rights violations.1 After World War II, the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals convened by the Allied powers, as well as parallel legal processes in a number of countries, established key precedents for the prosecution [...]