The best way to honour those whom the international community failed in Rwanda twenty years ago is to learn the right lessons and apply them today with greater resolve.
In contemporary Rwanda, women are willing to speak out and actively shape public discourse on such issues as the government, ethnicity, the genocide, and sexual violence.
Though the failure of the international community to prevent and alleviate suffering in Syria is lamentable, it is too early to despair over the future of the R2P.
A historically framed IR, informed by a historical-sociological perspective, not only enriches IR theory but also helps to understand questions of transformation and phenomenon such as genocide.
While it might seem optimistic to think that a tool for forecasting genocide can break down the political calculations that so often seem to obstruct effective responses to genocide, it is surely a hope worth chasing.
The fact is that humanitarian intervention is here to stay. Instead of trying to get rid of it there is more prudence in allowing the lesser evil of a streamlined and legally-regulated form of humanitarian intervention to continue.
In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Hutus killed about 700 hundred thousand Tutsis. This piece will discuss institutions and processes of reconciliation since the genocide, discussing both their positive and problematic aspects.
In this damning indictment of American indifference to humanitarian crises, journalist and academic Samantha Power refutes the arguments that US leaders were either unaware of genocidal horrors in the Twentieth Century or unable to stop them. Instead, the majority of American leaders knowingly did nothing as millions suffered.
One of the most depressing, and distressing, realities we have to acknowledge has been our inability to prevent or halt the recurring horror of mass atrocity crimes.
With the exception of Raphael Lemkin’s efforts and the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, no idea has moved faster in the international normative arena than “the responsibility to protect”. While blow-back from Libya is inevitable, nonetheless R2P is alive and well.
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