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This paper uses the concept of ‘Slow Violence’ in a Palestinian village to explore the political ecology of the Israeli settlers-colonial paradigm. Slow Violence is violence that manifests graduall...

This article explores the delayed responses of international and continental bodies in safeguarding the human rights of the people of Sudan. The central question grappled with in this article is: how effective were the international and continental peacekeeping, security, and human rights bodies in dealing with Sudanese cases of genocide, war crimes, crime against humanity and ethnic cleansing? The existing body of knowledge on this subject lacks a clear explanation of why Omar Al Bashir remained in power for such a long period of time in Sudan without any international or continental effective responses when he violated fundamental human rights. As such, this article aims to contribute to the existing body of knowledge by filling the knowledge gap identified. We argue that the international and continental peacekeeping, security, and human rights bodies delayed dismally in engaging the monocratic al-Bashir until the Sudanese army overthrew him. This article relied heavily on the qualitative research approach in the form of document and thematic content analysis to analyse the key themes and answer the central question.

When and why do states launch campaigns of genocide against minorities? In 2017, in a violent campaign increasingly described as genocide, the Myanmar military drove almost 700,000 Rohingya from Ra...

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is an example of “responsibility” becoming an institutionalized part of normative order, not only in practice but also in name. This chapter asks how the introduction of responsibility contributed to negotiating the protection of populations from war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and ethnic cleansing and what we can learn about responsibility in world politics through the case of R2P. The chapter starts with the protection dilemmas that arose by the end of the 1990s and shows that introducing responsibility to the debate responded to these normative conundrums on four levels: of discourse, institutionalization, collective expectations, and public justifications for state action. It argues that, on all four levels, responsibility facilitated the negotiation of protection, i.e. led to a better specification of what protection is and who should carry it out. It did so by providing politically acceptable terms of debate on the level of discourse and facilitating institutionalized knowledge on mass atrocities in policy-making. On the levels of collective expectations and public justifications for action, it ignited debates on specific responsibilities and understandings of protection, thus clarifying expectations on how to protect.

In our analyses we focus on the fact that in 2012 Slovenia was judged as systematically violating the right to respect for private life by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), due to its “erasure” in 1992 of residence permits for more than 25,000 persons from other former Yugoslav countries. The consequence of the erasure amounted to a stripping from the erased of the right to have rights. In fact, it was a form of administrative ethnic cleansing. Slovenia did not officially recognize the existence of a violation until 1999, when its Constitutional Court passed a judgment on the issue. Yet the erasure and its appalling consequences continued. Slovenian state authorities made numerous attempts to remedy the situation, but these efforts were always, at least in part, subverted by the rightist political forces.

This chapter looks at how international criminal law has become a crucial tool to foster the protection of cultural heritage. On the normative level, the main developments consisted in the introduction of rules criminalizing acts against cultural property in binding treaties dealing with the protection of cultural property in times of armed conflict. Then, international criminal tribunals (ICTs) paved the way for implementing individual criminal responsibility. Three different and partially divergent approaches have characterized the criminalization of acts against cultural property. The first two—civilian use and cultural value—emerged in different moments and had a strong impact on the drafting of rules criminalizing acts against cultural property in times of armed conflict. The third one, the human dimension approach, developed from the jurisprudence of ICTs and characterizes both the qualification of acts against cultural property as crimes against humanity and their role in proving the mental element of genocide.

Cold War Europe’s largest and most intensive act of ethnic cleansing, namely, the 1989 expulsion of Turks from communist Bulgaria, remains a neglected subject three decades on after the event. When it took place, the term “ethnic cleansing” had not been invented yet, so in light of international law this expulsion was a “population transfer.” Population transfers (even unilateral) were deemed legal until the mid-1990s. Subsequently, under the influence of the atrocities committed during the wars of Yugoslav succession, population transfers were criminalized and relabelled as “ethnic cleansings.” For a variety of reasons, the 1989 Ethnic Cleansing has been also neglected by scholars and politicians in both, Bulgaria and Turkey. The neglect continues to this day, despite the Bulgarian Parliament’s momentous 2012 Declaration, which officially recognized the expulsion as an act of ethnic cleansing. This Declaration – which could become a basis for successful Turkish-Bulgarian reconciliation – largely remains unknown in both countries, while the propagandistic terminology employed for referring to the 1989 Ethnic Cleansing deepens the oblivion and obfuscates the nature of this tragic event. Both, in Turkish and Bulgarian, official and scholarly terminology employed suggests – incorrectly – that it was a “kind of emigration.” Postprint

Drawing on Soviet and Romanian postwar trial material, this study offers a renewed exploration of the Bogdanovka mass murder, while highlighting the extemporaneous character of the most deadly single episode of the Romanian Holocaust. As this case demonstrates, even when there was no initial intent to slaughter Jews in a given area, other local circumstances and actors linked up to cause the obliteration of over 45,000 Jews in a matter of days. In the winter of 1941, the Romanian authorities’ search for solutions to two separate problems—a man-made sanitary crisis and Bucharest's intention of removing Jews from the territories under its control—closely intertwined to spark a genocidal decision. The documentation reviewed for this study provides rare insight into Romanian and German micro-cooperation on the ground, and reveals the “double functionality” logic, which formed the basis of the Axis powers’ jointly planned and implemented murder operation. Simultaneously, the paper discusses the entangl...

The essay utilized two concepts, lawfare and spacio-cide, to place different facets of “belonging” into conversation with one another. The concepts highlight how the progressive erasure of citizens...

In the vulnerable southeastern Bangladeshi city, Cox’s Bazar, an estimated 1 million Rohingyas languish in spartan refugee camps following brutal ethnic cleansing from their homes in Rakhine, a sta...

RésuméLe nettoyage ethnique est désormais une réalité ancrée dans les relations internationales. Confrontée à cette évidence ces dernières années, la communauté internationale tente de le cerner en droit positif. Les multiples efforts visant à affirmer la prohibition de cette pratique et à la sanctionner en droit international conduisent toutefois à emprunter un raccourci qui ajoute à la confusion et sa complexité déjà évidente. Cette contribution critique vise à appréhender la notion en droit en envisageant une approche compréhensible et téléologique qui restitue le véritable objet et le but ultime du nettoyage ethnique. La finalité d’un tel exercice consiste à inciter les internationalistes à ouvrir un autre chapitre de la réflexion sur les crimes internationaux, en œuvrant à donner une véritable connotation juridique autonome à ce phénomène répréhensible que constitue le nettoyage ethnique, pour asseoir fermement sa positivité.

What happens when an armed group has military incentives to engage in ethnic cleansing, but political incentives to abstain? I argue that militants can solve this dilemma by collecting intelligence that allows them to discriminate between neutral and militant non-coethnics and target only the latter. Armed groups are better able to do so in intermixed areas, where loyal coethnics provide intelligence, and thus more likely to perpetrate selective violence in such locations. Homogenous, non-coethnic enclaves are more susceptible to ethnic cleansing as armed groups often have little choice but to use ethnicity as proxy for political loyalties. I elaborate and test this argument using an original data set and extensive interviews on a critical case in the literature on ethnic cleansing: the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990.

The issue of democracy in the countries of post-Soviet space is of particular interest to the scientific and expert community. Not the last role in these processes was played by the escalation of the number of ethnic conflicts that have taken place in the territories of these countries. However, the American political scientist M. Mann has offered a new perspective on processes of democratization. He developed the concept of “the dark side of democracy”. According to the author, democracy can be seen not only in the traditional sense as “people power”, but as “the power of a particular ethnic group”. In the second approach, widespread ethnic cleansing that occur in the course of the development of conflicts at the national (religious) grounds. Аll the negative feelings, from class to religious hatred is a reason for the intensification of ethnic nationalism. In the case of escalation of conflict, he began to absorb particular components of ethnic confrontation (favoritism in respect of individual group members, discrimination against outsiders the existence of ethnic tensions, the presence of horizontal inequalities between culturally divided groups). While maintaining these trends, says M. Mann, we can say that the dark side of democracy is expressed in the perversion of the liberal or socialist ideals of democracy. According to M. Mann, at a time when certain ethnic or religious group (Turks, Hutus, Albanians) begin classify themselves as the true exponents of the popular will, is a perversion of the true democratic values and democracy as a whole. Referring to the experience of the Soviet Union, M. Mann notes that the role of such a “privileged” political actor in socialist societies the assigned classes. The analyst notes that a particularly brutal and bloody purge — a phenomenon of modernity, since in earlier times they were not as widespread as in the 80-90-years of the twentieth the twentieth century. As the most striking instance of the countries in which the concept of the dark side of democracy became widespread, the author of the article was chosen Yugoslavia (period 80’s-90’s of the twentieth century) and Ukraine (modern political processes in the country occurring since 2014 to present). These states were chosen because of the similarity of the processes of democratization, the presence of ethnic conflict (the confrontation between Albanians, Croats, Serbs in Jugoslavia and the Western and South-Eastern part of Ukraine), as well as the presence in both countries political actors seeking to justify pre-emptive right to the sovereignty of a particular territory.

“Genocide” provides a useful optic with which to understand and examine purposeful purges of Mesopotamian, Alexandrine, Visogothic, Norman, Mongol, and Spanish (during the Inquisition) people, and those of more modern times. Raphaël Lemkin’s cross-disciplinary arguments, developed in the crucible of an unfolding Holocaust and trimmed and refined at the United Nations, offer new insights into the actions of rulers and ruling classes, into the elimination or forcible assimilation of all manner of groups, and into the kinds of decisions that dominant populations made throughout recorded time to brand, and then discriminate against and persecute, weaker or minority groups.

According to the extant literature, state leaders pursue mass ethnic violence against minority groups in wartime if they believe that those groups are collaborating with an enemy. Treating the wartime leadership of a combatant state as a coherent unit, however, is misleading. Even in war, leaders differ in the degree to which they prioritize goals such as maintaining or expanding the territory of the state, and on whether they believe that minority collaboration with the enemy influences their ability to achieve those goals. Also, how leaders react to wartime threats from minority groups depends largely on the role that political organizations based on non-ethnic cleavages play in society. Depending on those cleavages, wartime minority collaboration may result in limited deportations and killings, ethnic cleansing, or minimal violence. A comparison of the policies of three multinational empires toward ethnic minority collaborators during World War I—the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italians, the Ottoman Empire and Armenians, and the Russian Empire and Muslims in the South Caucasus—illustrates this finding.

International audience; To explain war rapes in former Yugoslavia, the work of cultural ideology is never complete, but an unstable relation between cultural activism and cultural norms and practices provides the point of departure to move beyond the stereotyped accounts of mass rapes and develop a neo-structural model of canonical formalization based on discourse analysis and transformational morphodynamics. Methodologically, the new model takes lead from the abstract mathematical operations and canonical transformations suggested by Lévi-Strauss for the structural study of myth. The assumption is that mass rapes are fueled by a specific cultural activism that activates a cultural ideology that makes mass rapes effective in a military strategy of ethnic cleansing.

The government's performance in the State of Myanmar raises questions about the reality of its position on what is happening to the range of its citizens who are Muslims Alrohengjian, it bear full responsibility for the protection and preservation of their rights. Despite the government's signing of Myanmar on the international agreements and conventions on human rights, despite its stated commitment to the protection of human rights and the promotion of democracy and the rule of law; the government has not taken any real action to protect the Rohingyas and address violence or stop racist policy of ethnic cleansing, which govern the Muslims of Rohingya by Buddhist extremists. We will discuss in this paper what is really happening to the Muslims Alrohengjian in Myanmar, especially in the recent wave of persecution and ethnic cleansing against them, and we are exposed to historical backgrounds of these crimes and the role of internal constitutional provisions and the provisions of international conventions on the protection of this vulnerable minority

The United Nations faces an existential crisis. The norms that bind and ‘safeguard humanity’ are currently under threat. The deliberate bombing of hospitals and the indiscriminate killing of civilians has become almost routine in Syria and several other conflicts. Numerous governments and murderous non-state actors (like isis or Boko Haram) are defying international humanitarian and human rights law. This article argues that the solution to the current global exigency and a central challenge facing the next Secretary-General is to achieve an equilibrium shift away from crisis response and towards conflict prevention. This is especially true with regard to preventing mass atrocity crimes (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing). Historically, no single issue has done more to tarnish the reputation of the un than the failure to halt atrocities. Under a committed Secretary-General, the un has unique capacity to prevent these crimes.

In September 1913, when Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Constantinople, for the first time in history two states agreed on a population exchange based on the ethnicity of the i...

This article deals with post-war population movements affecting Yugoslav Vojvodina in the period between 1918 and 1996, with a strong focus on the first half of the twentieth century. It is argued that many Yugoslav/Serbian political and military leaders considered the aftermaths of wars and wars in the neighbourhood respectively a convenient window of opportunity for ‘adjusting’ the ethnic structure in specific regions according to their visions and ideals. Such an ethnic ‘cleansing’ combined with social engineering occurred in Vojvodina in the years from 1919 to 1922, from 1944 to 1947 and again during the Yugoslav wars of secession in the 1990s. With each of these colonization projects, this ‘most European region of Serbia’ (Aleksandar Popov, Director of the Centre for Regionalism, Novi Sad) became more Serbian on the one hand and less multicultural on the other.

Repeated violent attacks and arson campaigns perpetrated by organized gangs targeted Muslim communities in Rakhine State of Myanmar in 2012 and 2013. The attacks came after decades of tension between the Muslim minority and the Rakhine Buddhist majority. Many Muslims--mainly those often known as Rohingya--in Rakhine State are effectively stateless, having failed to attain any form of citizenship. (1) Campaigns against Muslims in Rakhine State, who make up around one third of the State's overall population of about 3.2 million, (2) have been described by Human Rights Watch as "ethnic cleansing". (3) In 2012, groups of local Rakhine activists razed communities to the ground in central districts of the State as part of a concerted effort to change the area's ethnic composition. Further violent clashes have been attributed to perpetrators from both the minority and majority communities, but reputable sources agree that the main aggressors were affiliated with Rakhine Buddhist networks. (4) Casualty figures are unreliable, but up to 1,000 people, the majority of them Muslim, are thought to have died in inter-communal violence during 2012. In two waves of attacks, most of the Muslims living in central parts of Rakhine State were displaced from their communities and relocated to isolated camps. Their freedom of movement remained restricted after the violence subsided. (5) In most instances, a similar pattern of violence evolved. A specific and emotive flashpoint, such as allegations of offences committed by Muslim men against Rakhine women, was seized as a rallying call for a violent response by groups of mostly young Rakhine men. Tensions remained high and in 2015 most of the 140,000 Muslims who had fled from their homes were still confined to camps. (6) Individuals associated with the 2012 violence appear to have close ties to ethnic Rakhine politicians such as Kyaw Zaw Oo, a political activist who published an outspoken revisionist tract alleging that Muslims in Rakhine State were aliens. Despite having been arrested for his role in the communal violence of 2012, he stood successfully for a parliamentary seat in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State in the November 2015 general elections. (7) This article explores the reasons behind the outbreak of violence in Rakhine State in 2012. It considers patterns identified in comparative analyses of communal and ethnic violence, and identifies the main factors that affect this specific case. The research approach uses primary data, consisting mainly of interviews by the author with key informants in Rakhine State and Yangon during several periods in 2013 and 2014. Secondary sources were also consulted, including media coverage, official government statements, reports from humanitarian agencies, online blogs and published academic work. (8) Taken together, these sources cover the circumstances and the wider context of the violence in Rakhine State at that time. The findings also take account of the outcome of the elections of 8 November 2015, an important landmark for politicians in Rakhine State and for all of Myanmar. In addressing the reasons behind ethnic conflicts, researchers have considered specific aspects of violence, focusing on identifiable political and social factors that can be observed across recent conflicts. Empirical studies suggest that the risk of violence is greater among populations with high levels of stratification along ethnic lines whereby certain ethnic groups are more privileged than others. Frances Stewart's work builds on earlier literature addressing multiethnic societies and finds that disparities between ethnic groups or "horizontal inequalities" increase the likelihood of conflict. (9) Michael Mann states that in areas inhabited by different ethnic groups, a high level of nationalism defined along ethnic lines tends to justify extreme standpoints, enable leaders to create scapegoats out of minorities and reduce the scope to manage inter-group tensions. …

Between 1846 and 1870, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000.1 Diseases, dislocation, and starvation caused many of these deaths. However, abduction, unfree labor, mass death on reservations, individual homicides, battles, and massacres also took thousands of lives and hindered reproduction. Historian Gary Clayton Anderson claims that what happened in California during these years should primarily be defined as ethnic cleansing, or forced removal, and not genocide.2 Forced removals did occur, but ultimately this was a case of genocide, sanctioned and facilitated by state and federal officials. The organized destruction of California Indians under United States rule was not a closely guarded secret. Mid-nineteenth-century California newspapers and private individuals, as well as state and federal officials, frequently addressed and often encouraged what we now call genocide. As early as 1890, historian Hubert Howe Bancroft called the killing “one of the last human hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all.”3 Fifty-three years later, historical demographer Sherburne F. Cook wrote the first major study of the topic. Using varied sources, he quantified the violent killing of 4,556 California Indians between 1847 and 1865, concluding, “since the quickest and easiest way to get rid of [the Northern California Indian] was to kill him off, this procedure was adopted as standard for some years.”4 In the same year that Cook published his groundbreaking article, legal scholar Raphael Lemkin coined a new word for an ancient crime. Defining the concept in 1944, he combined “the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide ,” or killing, to describe …

Gary Clayton Anderson has boldly instigated a conversation on the nature of Indian-white conflict in the American West—in a nutshell he asks, was it genocide or ethnic cleansing? Anderson answers this emphatically: ethnic cleansing, which he defines as “forced dislocation with the intent to take away lands of a particular ethnic, religious, or cultural group.” He argues that we should not label what happened in the West in the late nineteenth century as genocide because relatively low numbers of Indians were killed and there was no official intent to eliminate Indians. His most intriguing argument is that government officials engaged in one crime against humanity—ethnic cleansing through forced deportation and confinement to reservations—to actually prevent the more heinous crime of genocide. Anderson’s formulation of Indian-white conflict in the West as an either/or choice strikes me as an oversimplification of what is actually a both/and phenomenon. Scholars such as Brendan C. Lindsay and Benjamin Madley have shown—pretty incontrovertibly—that it is entirely appropriate to use the term genocide to represent what happened in California in the late nineteenth century.1 Anderson has shown that ethnic cleansing may be a more accurate term for what transpired in other instances.2 In this brief commentary, I intend to critique both genocide and ethnic cleansing as limiting concepts and discuss alternative means of understanding a broader history of Indian-white conflict that puts women and children at the center rather than at the periphery of our historical inquiry. I have researched, written, and spoken about Indigenous child removal in the American West, Australia, and Canada for nearly twenty years, and I am often asked whether the practice should …

For scholars Gary Clayton Anderson, John Mack Faragher, and Guenter Lewy, among many others, genocide appears to be a term reserved for Turks, Nazis, Cambodians, Rwandans, and other truly evil peoples but is unsuitable for application to American history.1 Anderson has decided that the correct term to apply to the history of American Indian policy is ethnic cleansing , and that the 1998 Rome Statute provides the singularly correct bureaucratic entity to determine such matters. He glosses in passing that “[t]he Rome Statute does not specifically outline the crime of ‘ethnic cleansing,’” his own preferred term. He also incorrectly states that the United States has “accepted” the International Criminal Court; in fact, the United States continues to reject the jurisdiction of the ICC as a matter of state policy.2 The historian’s task is to interrogate, frame, and contextualize terminology rather than assert (or dismiss) terms as if the meaning of these representations was precise or self-evident.3 I heartily concur with Anderson that ethnic cleansing is an excellent term to describe what happened in the colonial encounter. In American Settler Colonialism: A History , I employed it liberally, but I also argued that the United States “pursued a continuous ‘foreign-policy’ of colonial genocide targeting indigenous North Americans.” I added that, through centuries of borderland conflict, Americans “internalized a propensity for traumatic, righteous violence, and a quest for total security, which came to characterize a series of future conflicts.4 Anderson rejects the definition adopted in the 1948 United Nations convention on genocide, which …

The Nigerian Government's declaration of 'no victor, no vanquished' after the capitulation of Biafra on 12 January 1970, was applauded as the right step towards reconciliation and transition from war to peace. Despite this declaration and assurance of amnesty, the Nigerian Government and its soldiers still engaged in acts that amounted to retributive justice. They starved and killed innocent Biafran civilians, looted their property and raped their women. Surprisingly, these postwar atrocities committed against former Biafrans have been largely ignored in the historiography of the Nigeria-Biafra War. This paper seeks to fill the gap in the war literature by interrogating Nigerian Government's attitude towards the postwar humanitarian crisis and crimes against humanity in former Biafra. The paper argues that former Biafrans were not fully reintegrated into the Nigerian society and that the Nigerian Government deliberately neglected them to die in large numbers, thereby making it difficult for the war victims to recover from the hardships of the conflict.

The historical region of Galicia was appropriated successively by the Habsburg Imperium, Independent Poland, the USSR, Hitler Germany, and Communist Poland and the USSR. It is presently divided in to two by the border between Poland and Ukraine, the EU and the belt of post-Soviet states. Its multicultural past has been eradicated through genocide, ethnic cleansing, and deportations by Hitler and Stalin as well as various interethnic conflicts between Polish and Ukrainian nationalists. From 1989 on, pilgrims, survivors, root tourists, and also religious, political, and community activists have started to rediscover it. Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, as well as Russian and Western travelers cross the borders to remember their childhood places, the locus of their deportation or survival, or the cradle of the family history, or just a province lost. Their expectations are partly met, or sometimes ignored, by municipal and regional authorities, travel agencies, private businesses, and locals, who all contribute to form a network of touristic infrastructures. The memory of WW2 and of the subsequent deportations looms large in the personal agendas of tourists and community activists. However, Poland and Ukraine envision local, historical, and identity tourism in the region variously. While Western Ukraine tries to convey a strongly nationalistic and monoethnic image of the region, Poland, under the influence of EU guidelines and subsidies, has opened to a more multicultural and postmodern concept. Transnational tourism across the border participates in the reassertion of conflicting national identities.

At the 2005 World Summit, all Heads of State and Government affirmed the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The responsibility to protect (commonly referred to as ‘RtoP’) rests upon three pillars of equal standing: the responsibility of each State to protect its populations (pillar I); the responsibility of the international community to assist States in protecting their populations (pillar II); and the responsibility of the international community to protect when a State is manifestly failing to protect its populations (pillar III). The adoption of the principle in 2005 constituted a solemn commitment, which included much expectation of a future free of these crimes.

In 1949, federal parliamentarians were indignant when asked to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (hereafter, UNGC). We could not in any way be associated with ‘the unthinkable’ crime, senior members claimed, because we are ‘a moral people’ with a ‘clean record'. This essay assesses the ‘decent’ Australian democrats who, as the indelible records show, set out to kill the Aboriginal people they deemed ‘vermin’ and then later, decided to engage in a eugenicist fantasy to rid Australia of Aborigines by intermarriage or, failing that, forcibly removing their children in large numbers. The colonial frontier killings were justified as ‘dispersing kangaroos'. Child removals were done ‘in their best interests'. This essay attempts to gain an insight into the mindset of those who did commit ‘the unthinkable’ crime of genocide: killing, removal of children, and ‘causing serious bodily and mental harm'. Subsequent policies infantalised the Aboriginal and Islander population and denied them basic human rights.

This policy note examines the implications for advocacy which follow from the rather obscure and confusing relationship between one of the most odious human experiences, ethnic cleansing, and the system of international law. From the very distant history of Assyria to, among others, the most contemporary disturbing displacements of human beings from Darfur (Sudan), Aleppo (Syria), and of the Rohingya from Myanmar, the policy widely known as ethnic cleansing has resisted time to maintain its indeterminate legal existence. Neither the more recent 2015 (Croatia v. Serbia) nor the 2007 (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro) genocide cases have cured the plague. To the contrary, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has remained faithful to its statement that ethnic cleansing has no legal significance of its own. This policy note draws attention to the impact that an illdefined 'policy' or practice exerts on human rights advocacy, weakening its effectiveness and diminishing its results.

The international community has often proven incapable of dealing with state-led crimes against humanity, and Myanmar could prove another missed milestone. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a decision in early September this year ruling that it has jurisdiction over the deportations (ethnic cleansing) of the Rohingya people from Myanmar to Bangladesh. The landmark decision by the ICC was based on the prosecution’s request dated for a ruling on jurisdiction for the crime of deportation under the Rome Statute, the founding document of the Court.

This article examines the divide between national and local collective memory in Poland and investigates the role of “memory activists” in mediating and exploiting this divide. It narrows its focus to the ethnic cleansing of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) from 1943 to 1944 and the forced relocation of Ukrainians in Poland, Operation Vistula, in 1947. It surveys local and national newspapers to understand competing interpretations and analyzes what incidents (e.g. protests, disputes, commemorations, reenactments, etc.) related to these events take place in local communities. It highlights the many actors, “memory activists,” and associations involved in pushing specific, often ahistorical, interpretations of these events – motivated by political gain, careerism, or personal conviction. It uses the theoretical works of Maurice Halbwachs and Karl Mannheim to effectively distinguish between local and national phenomenon and to elucidate the various nuances of collective memory.

This article critically examines the concept of ethnic cleansing in light of the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Croatia v. Serbia. It suggests that the lack of overt reference to it in the Genocide Convention constitutes a significant lacuna in judicial recognition and protection of atrocities committed in both the Former Yugoslavia and more generally, which the ICJ categorically refused to address. Having examined how the ICJ attempted to conceptualize ethnic cleansing as evidence of both the actus reus of genocide (particularly in relation to Article II(c) of the Convention) and its mens rea, the article then critically assesses the Court's reasoning in its refusal to rule that a violation of the Convention had taken place in relation to deportation and forcible transfer. The article then concludes by contending that the Court simply failed to provide a much-needed and workable precedent to properly include ethnic cleansing within the legal and factual matrix of genocide.

This paper examines the violence in the Tajik Civil War (1992–1997). The actions of both sides mimicked ethnic cleansing as civilian settlements were targeted. The fragmented ethno-regional identities of the republic had historically lived together peacefully, so this style of violence was unanticipated. However, its patterns resemble similar events in the past 40 years that have been examined by other scholars. By conceptualizing it as a modern phenomenon that can be compared to, I develop a better understanding of this form of violence in the Tajik Civil War and place it within scholarly work on ethnic cleansing.

The Rohingya in Burma have been called ‘the world's most persecuted minority' and subjected to pervasive human rights violations, including ethnic cleansing, statelessness and possibly genocide. Despite the international community's commitment to the responsibility to protect (R2P), which includes violence prevention, the plight of vulnerable populations such as the Rohingya has been relatively ignored. This article encourages dialogue about the R2P's potential for preventing direct and structural violence, building on its foundation of sovereignty as responsibility. While preventative action to assist the Rohingya comes with an array of challenges, the normative foundations of R2P – including connections to combatting internal displacement and ‘unbundling' protection to challenge structural inequalities – provide a toolkit of responses apart from military force. It is imperative that scholars and practitioners alike critically consider the practical value of R2P, as well as re-examine glaring and overloo...

This article assesses whether shifting the focus of responsibility to protect (R2P) as a response to crimes as such would potentially result in a greater support to implement the concept by the Security Council. Ten years ago, the international community endorsed the R2P concept as a response to genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. However, the inaction of the Security Council in the situation in Syria sadly illustrates the current lack of consensus among the permanent Member States on the implementation of R2P. This article suggests redefining R2P as a response to core international crimes building upon their unifying effect.

In war or other armed conflicts, generally women are categorized as vulnerable people. Sexual violence and harassment towards women is frequently use as a technique to committed torture against them. The torture are meant to create terror or as one of the methods of ethnic cleansing. Considering that women could be categorized as combatant in certain situation and seeing the development in internal armed conflict that allowed women to participate in hostile situation as combatant, this paper would like to give an overview towards women position in war and armed conflicts related to international humanitarian law.

In the roughly four centuries of Euro-American ‘discovery’, exploration, conquest, and colonial ‘settlement’ (1492–1890), the number of North American Indians for the conterminous USA was drastical...

This paper asks whether Bosnian Serb leaders’ choice to carry out a secession war in 1992–1995 was rational from the point of view of their stated goal of ethnic cleansing. We construct two indexes, one of ethnic purity and another of ethnic Serb concentration, and apply them to a counterfactual estimate of the outcome of ‘peaceful’ ethnic cleansing – what could have been achieved by population exchange based on pre-war territorial Serb power without war – in comparison to the actual outcome of the war. We find that the gross benefits of the chosen strategy of secession and war far exceed anything that could be achieved by the peaceful alternative. A conjectural assessment of perceived costs suggests that also net benefits were maximized by the war strategy. The implication for international deterrence policy is that credible judicial prosecution and punishment is the best way to alter the prospective perpetrators’ calculus.

One hundred years ago, the Ottoman regime, best known as that of the Young Turks, began a series of actions that led to the genocides of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks that only ended in 1923. The articles presented in this special issue of Genocide Studies International deal with the competing interpretations of why the Armenian Genocide occurred, with what the German archives reveal about it and any German responsibility for it, and with Turkish denial since the 1960s. They also make major contributions to understanding the lesser-known Ottoman genocides, those against the Assyrians and the Greeks. There are also questions raised about the concept of genocide and its relation to ethnic cleansing, massacres, deportation, and war. Overall, there is the theme of the complexity of genocide: modes, techniques, and motives. Careful consideration of the Ottoman genocides deepens our understanding of what genocide is and how it can be enacted. What must be averted is letting its complexity become a cover for denial.

The Assyrian Genocide involved many non-Armenian Christian groups native to eastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. Among them were the Assyrian Church of the East, the Chaldean Church, the Syriac Orthodox, and some smaller sects. Massacres and ethnic cleansing culminated during the summer and fall of 1915. Using archival documents from the Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archive (Istanbul) and the Military History and Strategic Studies Directorate Archives (Ankara), this article discusses the involvement of the Young Turk government and the Ottoman army in two extreme cases of Assyrian resistance. It then takes up possible explanations as to why these groups were targeted.

In 1946, in the Southern Urals, construction of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics first plutonium plant fell to the GULAG-Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD). The chief officers in charge of the program – Lavrentii Beria, Sergei Kruglov, and Ivan Tkachenko – had been pivotal figures in the deportation and political and ethnic cleansing of territories retaken from Axis forces during WWII. These men were charged with building a nuclear weapons complex to defend the Soviet Union from the American nuclear monopoly. In part thanks to the criminalization and deportation of ethnic minorities, Gulag territories grew crowded with foreign nationals and ethnic minorities in the postwar years. The NKVD generals were appalled to find that masses of forced laborers employed at the plutonium construction site were members of enemy nations. Beria issued orders to cleanse the ranks of foreign enemies, but construction managers could not spare a single healthy body as they raced to complete their deadlines. To solve this problem, they created two zones: an interior, affluent zone for plutonium workers made up almost exclusively of Russians; and anterior zones of prisoners, soldiers, ex-cons, and local farmers, many of whom were non-Russian. The selective quality of Soviet “nuclearity” meant that many people who were exposed to the plant's secret plutonium disasters were ethnic minorities, people whose exposures went unrecorded or under-recorded because of their invisibility and low social value.

“[T]he United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.” To discuss the role of the Security Council and its members in combating genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing, one could hardly find a better point of departure than these famous words endorsed by Dag Hammarskjold in 1954.

Refugee camps are generally conceived as an indication of ongoing conflict. As refugee generating conflicts become increasingly complex and protracted, however, camps become sites of post-conflict reconstruction. This has been the experience for the Bhutanese refugees who have lived in camps for close to thirty years, and are subject to numerous efforts to reconstruct their lives, community and economy. The international organizations that fund and manage the camps have directed their attention to the society of victims, rather than the state that perpetrated the crimes. Yet because the population lacks citizenship and their camps exist within another post-conflict state, these reconstruction efforts have contributed to corruption and exploitation. This article highlights that when post-conflict reconstruction is used to transform populations rather than states, these efforts may foster corruption because they allow the original perpetrating state to act with impunity.

Terrorism is a notoriously difficult concept that defies single universal definition. Terrorists intentionally employ violence in order to instill fear in their victims and the wider public. Terrorist movements aim to achieve their political, social and/or religious goals through use of violent acts. (Hoffman, 1998: 43) In most cases terrorism is perpetrated by non-state actors and is "bottom up" challenge to the existing political order. However this article argues that the nature of the crime and not the perpetrator should determine whether some criminal act constitutes terrorism and acts of terror can also be committed by states and/or state actors. In this article, the author will examine the overall strategy and tactics used by the Milosevic and Karadzic regimes in BiH and Kosovo to fulfil their wartime ambitions of maintaining and consolidating control over Serb and Serb-occupied territory, relying primarily upon the indictments and judgments of the ICTY in which they and members of their armed forces acting under their authority have been charged and/or convicted of war crimes and terror, along with reports from international organizations such as the United Nations and other sources. Through an analysis of these tactics against leading definitions of terrorism, it will be demonstrated that rather than fighting against terrorists and insurgents, the Milosevic and Karadzic regimes carried out acts of terror during the wars in Kosovo and BiH, respectively, and furthermore Milosevic was sponsoring state-terrorism in BiH (Blakely, 2012: 3-4).

The doctrine of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) the civilian population against genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity was established in paragraphs 138 and 139 of the “Outcome Document” of the 2005 World Summit, which was held in New York between September 14 and 16, 2005. It was reaffirmed in April 2006 by the UN Security Council through Resolution 1674. This doctrine—RtoP—consists in not recognizing national sovereignty as a right, but as a responsibility to prevent and deter four crimes—genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing—under the generic term Mass Atrocity Crimes.

Due to its geo-strategic location, Turkey has the leading point in the migration movement. Surrounded by seas, being very close Europe and promising future and stability are the tempting factors for migrants who flee from wars, ethnic cleansing, poverty, terror, clan wars and civil wars. The history of migration in the Middle East is not that long, possibly started around 1960's and reached its peak in the last decade with the events like invasion of lraq, Syrian civil War. The insecurity, instability and loss of idea of future led local people to abandon their homes, livings and even their close relatives..., Jeo-stratejik konumu nedeniyle, Türkiye göç hareketinde öncü konumdadır. Türkiye'nin denizlerle çevrili olması, Avrupa'ya yakınlığı, parlak geleceği ve istikrarlı yapısı, Türkiye'yi savaştan, soykırımdan, yoksulluktan, terörden ve iç savaştan kaçmak isteyen göçmenler için cazip bir yer haline getirmiştir. Ortadoğu'da göç tarihi o kadar uzun değildir. Muhtemelen 1960'lı yıllarda başlamış ve lrak'ın işgali, Suriye iç savaşı gibi olaylarla son on yılda tavan yapmıştır...