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 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 SUSAN BENESCH Once unimaginable, prosecutions for state-sponsored atrocities are multiplying rapidly. They continue to deliver new milestones, both by expanding transnationally and by reaching previously untouchable defendants. Some trials astonish even their own proponents, as this symposium illustrated: Peru’s conviction of its former head of state Alberto Fujimori in April left Ronald Gamarra Herrera [...]
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 [...]
BY HUGO VAN DER MERWE In 1995, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) introduced a mechanism that offered a morally compromised form of accountability: amnesty in exchange for public disclosure of truth. While this was a bitter pill to swallow for the South African public and an unacceptable deal for many victims, it [...]
BY SOLON SIMMONS There is no part of the world more crucial to the strategic interests of the United States as is the Middle East. While the traditional problems of the regulation of international affairs are at play there, Arab language satellite channels have created a new force in the region, and Al Jazeera is [...]
BY VANESSA NOËL BROWN Located at the intersection of Africa and Europe, the kingdom of Morocco has long been a melting pot and a colorful example of globalization. Since the 9th century AD Berbers, Muslims and Jews lived, worked and studied together in this region. Today’s youth bulge in North Africa can be viewed as [...]
BY JEFFREY W. MANTZ Nobody likes to hear about blood diamonds, that something venerated as our culture’s highest token of commitment and affection comes to us haunted by specters of oppression, cruelty and murder. It took a 2006 film with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the role of a diamond-embezzling South African mercenary and a $100 million [...]
BY SANDRA I. CHELDELIN AND SUSAN F. HIRSCH In 2004, in collaboration with a local NGO in Dushanbe, our faculty at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution launched a multiyear project to increase conflict resolution capacities of local actors in Tajikistan. We worked with government, religious and academic leaders, created a conflict resolution resource [...]
BY REBECCA BRYANT By the time this article appears, the presidential election campaigns now in full swing in Cyprus should have resulted in a new president for the Republic. It is quite likely, according to many polls, that the new president will also be the old one. Tassos Papadopoulos, president since 2003, presided over an eventful [...]