Prosecution of grave violations of human rights in light of challenges of national courts and the intenational criminal court: The congolese dilemma

The war in the DRC has resulted in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis with over 3.4 million displaced persons scattered throughout the country. An estimated 4 million people have died as a result of the war. The most pressing need to be addressed is the question of justice and accountability for these human rights atrocities in order to achieve a durable peace in the country and also in the Great Lakes region. It is particularly true in post-conflict situations where justice systems have been either partially or completely destroyed, that national courts are not capable of arriving at a uniform stance, or willing to provide justice for atrocities in the immediate future. As a result, international justice seems to be a crucial and last resort that must continue to be fortified against efforts to undermine it. However, even if the ICC achieves its full potential, it faces a number of challenges. Firstly, it is realistically not able to address all situations in which national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute perpetrators. Secondly, there are temporal and other jurisdictional limitations on what cases the ICC can hear. Accordingly, the ICC will only have the power to try people accused of the gravest human rights violations committed after 1 July 2002; the date the Rome Statute which established the ICC took effect. As a result, only a small number of individuals responsible for the atrocities committed will be tried by this Court. Thirdly, is the establishment, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), one of the civilian institutions that emerged from the peace talks, meant to end impunity or to cover up gross violations of human rights committed in the DRC? It remains to be seen how it will function and interact with the courts.     

The Road to Hell? Third‐Party Intervention to Prevent Atrocities

Preventing large‐scale atrocities has emerged as an important policy goal of the post–Cold War period. However, a debate exists about the effects of creating an international institution to prevent atrocities. Advocates of intervention argue that a credible threat to intervene should deter perpetrators and stop atrocities when deterrence fails. Critics argue that third‐party intervention, by strengthening weak minority groups and lowering the cost of war, encourages rebellions and so makes war and atrocities more likely. We develop a model of intervention to analyze this debate. The model shows that the negative effects of intervention highlighted by critics can be mitigated if the third party is relatively neutral and if alternative costs are imposed on decision makers. We conclude that with appropriate institutional design, the net impact of stronger third‐party commitments to end atrocities will be to lower the expected level of atrocities.     

A “Slice of Cheese”—a Deterrence-Based Argument for the International Criminal Court

Over the last decade, theorists have persistently criticised the assumption that the International Criminal Court (ICC) can produce a noteworthy deterrent effect. Consequently, consensus has emerged that we should probably look for different ways to justify the ICC or else abandon the prestigious project entirely. In this paper, I argue that these claims are ill founded and rest primarily on misunderstandings as to the idea of deterrence through punishment. They tend to overstate both the epistemic certainty as to and the size of the deterrent effect necessary in order to thus justify punishment. I argue that we should in general expect reasonably humane punitive institutions to lead to better consequences than if we abolish punishment entirely, and I show that, contrary to widespread assumption among critics of the ICC, we should not expect the conditions characteristically surrounding mass atrocity to undermine this presumption. Properly understood, the ICC equals adding another “slice of cheese” to our comprehensive crime preventive system modelled along the lines of James Reason’s Swiss cheese model of accident causation and risk management. Undoubtedly, some future perpetrators will elope through the holes in this layer too, but others will be deterred.     

Framing and reframing R2P—a responsibility to protect humanity from evil

ABSTRACT

This article takes issue with de-politicised and moralistic conceptions of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and, inspired by the political theory of Hannah Arendt, develops a ‘re-politicised’ and ‘de-moralised’ account of R2P. It argues that by relying on a link between a moral responsibility to ‘save strangers’ and practical political action, R2P turns a blind eye to the political interest of powerful actors. And by trying to transform R2P into a ‘blueprint’, ‘roadmap’ or ‘emergency plan’ for political action, many commentators try to render obsolete political deliberation and practical judgement on a case-by-case basis. The present article argues that it is necessary to develop a more realistic view of R2P’s role and potential in world politics. R2P, it is argued, has an important discursive function and considerable potential to influence and guide international decision-making processes. Drawing on Arendt’s conception of ‘evil’ as a crime against humanity itself, this article reframes R2P as a ‘responsibility to protect humanity from evil’. An Arendtian understanding of mass atrocities as crimes against our common humanity (i.e. as evils) facilitates the development of a re-politicised and de-moralised account of R2P: This account recognises its discursive role, it actively seeks to generate political interest for action in the face of harrowing mass atrocities but also acts as a leash on intervention in less severe cases.

Abbreviation R2P: Responsibility to Protect; UN: United Nations; NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organisation; ICISS: International Committee on Intervention and State Sovereignty     

Strategic entry deterrence and terrorism: Theory and experimental evidence

Using a two stage rent-seeking framework, we present a simple model of strategic entry/terrorism deterrence and test the model using laboratory experiments. Our contest success function highlights the potential for strategic spillovers. The theory illustrates that, relative to a cooperative outcome, negative externalities lead to over-spending on deterrence and positive externalities lead to under-spending on deterrence. Our experimental results are broadly consistent; subjects in the negative externality treatment had higher expenditures. In contrast to theoretical predictions, participation decisions, while primarily driven by the probability of winning a contest, were influenced by a subject’s ability to participate in multiple contests.     

Early warning versus concept: the case of the Yom Kippur War 1973

This article begins with a definition of the terms ‘early warning’ and ‘surprise’, and examines whether the failure of Israeli Intelligence to warn Israeli decision-makers in 1973 conforms to these definitions. After examining the conventions of Israeli military intelligence regarding anticipating a surprise, and the conceptions on which these were based, the article demonstrates how events in late 1973 indicated a possible Arab attack on Israel, but also the manner in which the Concept used to measure these warnings proved more resilient than the warnings. Discussions in the few days preceding war, when information was accumulating, are subjected to particular attention. The development of a sub-conception, with the original framework allowed and changed the forecast from ‘no war’ to ‘low probability' of war. The persistence of the Concept is attributed to both strategic intelligence and also to the doctrine of deterrence. Like deterrence, intelligence success is hard to measure. One can never be sure that a surprise attack has been prevented as a result of early warning.     

How do prospects of EU membership influence support for secession? A survey experiment in Catalonia and Scotland

The past years have been eventful for secessionist movements in Europe and in particular in Scotland and Catalonia. Supporters and opponents of secession of both stateless nations considered their prospects for future EU membership as an important part of the campaigns leading to the referendums. The article’s aim is to explore whether international factors influence domestic support for secession. In order to answer this puzzle, an on-line survey experiment (n = 2408) was carried out in Catalonia and Scotland in which respondents were confronted with different scenarios concerning the EU membership of their hypothetical new state (inclusion or exclusion). Contrary to the general perception, the prospects of EU membership had only a limited effect on support for the creation of a sovereign state. Moreover, it was found that the impact was strongly mediated by the participants’ previous degree of nationalism and their attitudes with respect to the EU.     

First or Second Order Referendums? Understanding the Votes on the EU Constitutional Treaty in Four EU Member States

This article uses post-referendum Flash-Eurobarometer surveys to analyse empirically voter attitudes towards the EU Constitution in four member states. The theoretical model used incorporates first and second order variables for voting to ascertain whether the outcome of the vote was a reflection of either first or second order voting behaviour. It is hypothesised that the cleavage politics over integration in the European arena had a major impact on the four votes, as captured by three first order variables: ‘Europhile’ and ‘Constitution-phile’ attitudes and ‘Egocentric Europeanness’, respectively. The quantitative analyses – controlling for a number of dimensions – strongly supports the hypothesis when compared with a model using solely second order party identification variables. These findings establish that how voters understood the EU polity, in particular whether membership is beneficial to one's own country, was a crucial factor in all the referendums. Implications for future research include the need to discover the cues or proxies influencing first order voting within domestic politics.     

Ideas,spaces and ‘sovereigntyscapes’: Dramatising Scotland's production of a new institutional fix

Abstract

As part of a general endeavour to ‘modernise’ Britain for the epoch of globalisation, Britain's New Labour government has sought to integrate wide‐ranging constitutional reform with new structures for regional governance. Perhaps the most radical proposal concerns the attempt to align continued UK sovereignty with an elected parliament for Scotland in what has been called a ‘new covenant with the people’. This paper draws on Jane Jenson's neo‐Gramscian discourse‐regulation theory and its stress on social agency and the politics of representation, to explore the political, economic and socio‐spatial tensions and the related ideas, discursive forms and political processes that have given rise to this emergent institutional and representational ‘fix’. The author argues that rather than being perceived of solely as some ‘modernisation move’ on the part of a New Labour project, this reconfiguration of power and representation also needs to be traced to the political and representational style of Thatcherism, in particular, the latter's continuous ‘testing’ of the 1707 Treaty between Scotland and England as a negotiated settlement of economic and political union. The paper concludes with some reflections on the future prospects facing any future Scotland‐UK institutional settlement, including the question of sovereignty.     

NATO’s continuing adaptation

Despite US President Donald Trump’s noted hectoring on European NATO defence spending, several European NATO countries have been modestly increasing their spending for some time owing to national threat perceptions. The real challenges are to ‘spend better’, in ways that genuinely enhance military capabilities and in particular increase reassurance and deterrence vis-a-vis Russia, and to improve internal cohesion.     

Detecting Spillover Effects: Design and Analysis of Multilevel Experiments

Interpersonal communication presents a methodological challenge and a research opportunity for researchers involved in field experiments. The challenge is that communication among subjects blurs the line between treatment and control conditions. When treatment effects are transmitted from subject to subject, the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA) is violated, and comparison of treatment and control outcomes may provide a biased assessment of the treatment’s causal influence. Social scientists are increasingly interested in the substantive phenomena that lead to SUTVA violations, such as communication in advance of an election. Experimental designs that gauge SUTVA violations provide useful insights into the extent and influence of interpersonal communication. This article illustrates the value of one such design, a multilevel experiment in which treatments are randomly assigned to individuals and varying proportions of their neighbors. After describing the theoretical and statistical underpinnings of this design, we apply it to a large‐scale voter‐mobilization experiment conducted in Chicago during a special election in 2009 using social‐pressure mailings that highlight individual electoral participation. We find some evidence of within‐household spillovers but no evidence of spillovers across households. We conclude by discussing how multilevel designs might be employed in other substantive domains, such as the study of deterrence and policy diffusion.     

Quality Counts: Extending the Strategic Politician Model of Incumbent Deterrence

Competitive elections are essential to representative democracy. Competition in U.S. House elections is low in part because incumbents have strategic advantages that deter strong potential candidates from running. Many observers conclude that incumbents retain their seats without full accountability to the electorate, but the mechanisms of deterrence have never been fully explored from the perspective of strong potential candidates. Based on a survey of potential House candidates designed to capture perceptions of incumbents' personal quality and reelection prospects, we find strong evidence for the "strategic politicians" thesis ( Black 1972 ; Jacobson and Kernell 1983 ). We extend the logic of the strategic model first by showing that incumbents' reelection prospects are affected by their personal quality and second by demonstrating that incumbents' personal qualities deter strong challengers from running, independent of their electoral prospects. Our findings prompt us to suggest revisions to our understanding of competition and representation in contemporary House elections .     

Controlling the Airwaves: Incumbency Advantage and Community Radio in Brazil

Direct influence over communication media is a potent resource during electoral campaigns, and politicians have an incentive to gain control of the airwaves to advance their careers. In this article, we use data on community radio license applications in Brazil to identify both the causal effect of incumbency on politicians’ ability to control the media and the causal effect of media control on their future electoral prospects. Using a regression discontinuity design, we compare city council candidates who barely won or barely lost an election, showing that incumbency more than doubles the probability of an application’s approval by the Ministry of Communications. Next, using genetic matching, we compare candidates who acquired community radio licenses before an election to similar politicians who did not, showing that a radio station substantially increases one’s vote share and probability of victory. These findings demonstrate that media control helps entrench local political power in Brazil.     

The North Korean abduction issue: emotions,securitisation and the reconstruction of Japanese identity from ‘aggressor’ to ‘victim’ and from ‘pacifist’ to ‘normal’

Abstract

After Kim Jong-il's confession in 2002 that North Korean agents had abducted thirteen Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, North Korea has become the most detested country in Japan, and the normalisation of bilateral relations has been put on the back burner. The abduction issue has taken precedence in Japan even over North Korea's development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. It has also grossly overshadowed the atrocities for which Imperial Japan was responsible in the 20th century. Why has there been such strong emphasis on an issue that could be disregarded as comparatively ‘less important’? This article understands the ascendency of the abduction issue as the epitome of an identity shift under way in Japan – from the identity of a curiously ‘peaceful’ and inherently ‘abnormal’ state, to that of a more ‘normal’ one. The differentiation of North Korea as ‘abnormal’ emphasises Japan's own (claim to) ‘normality’. Indeed, by incarnating the perils of Japan's own ‘pacifist’ ‘abnormality’, which has been so central to the collective sense of Japanese ‘Self’ in the post-war period, the abduction issue has become a very emotional argument for Japan's ‘normalisation’ in security and defence terms. The transformation from ‘abnormal’ to ‘normal’ is further enabled by Japan trading places with North Korea in the discourse, so that Japan is defined as ‘victim’ (rather than former aggressor) and North Korea as ‘aggressor’ (rather than former victim). What is at stake here is the question whether Japan is ‘normalising’ or ‘remilitarising’, and the role of the abduction issue discourse in enabling such foreign and security policy change.     

Citizen Assessment of Electoral Reforms: Do Evaluations of Fairness Blunt Self-Interest?

A large literature shows that citizens care about the procedural fairness of rules and institutions. This body of work suggests that citizen evaluations of institutional changes should be constrained by fairness considerations, even if they would personally benefit from the reforms. We test this expectation using two panel studies to examine whether citizens become more accepting of proposals rated as unfair (in wave one) after we experimentally manipulate (in wave two) whether the proposals aid their party’s electoral prospects. Using this approach, we are able to establish what citizens see to be fair or unfair separate from their evaluation of a given rule change. We find that supporters of both parties are consistently more favorable toward reforms their fellow partisans and, crucially, they themselves, claim reduce electoral fairness when framed as advancing their partisan interests. The results provide important insights into how citizens evaluate electoral processes, procedural fairness, and, hence, the acceptable limits of institutional change.

     

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Leaders,Exile, and the Dilemmas of International Justice

In recent years, several oppressive leaders have been arrested and extradited to international courts. What are the consequences of this global justice cascade? I address this question by examining patterns of exile. I show that the justice cascade has a differential effect on leaders based on their culpability (whether they presided over atrocity crimes). In the past, culpable and nonculpable leaders went into exile at virtually identical rates. Today, however, culpable leaders are about six times less likely to flee abroad because exile no longer guarantees a safe retirement. These findings raise stark implications for existing research that debates whether international justice deters atrocities or prolongs conflicts. My results about exiled leaders, I explain, imply that the justice cascade should deter atrocities and prolong conflicts. Thus, instead of debating whether international justice is helpful or harmful, future scholarship should carefully consider the trade‐offs it creates.     

Shifting Currents: Changes in National Intelligence Estimates on the Iran Nuclear Threat

Lost in the political fallout of the Iran National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2007 was any discussion about historical parallels and what those might say about intersection between intelligence, policy, and politics. This article argues that the NIEs on the ballistic missile threat of the 1990s offer a useful analogy. In a short period of time, the NIE's assessment of the threat from so-called ‘rogue states’ went from modest to non-existent, provoking charges of politicization, eliciting investigations, and pausing the US missile defense program. A similar sequence of events followed the NIEs on Iran, whose tenor appeared to shift from alarmist in 2005 to dismissive in 2007. If the experience of the ballistic missile NIEs is any guide, then it is not clear that the `cure’– investigations and commissions – are better than the disease. Both cases illustrate the need for the intelligence community to remain detached but not unaware of the policy environment into which these estimates are introduced. They also reaffirm that estimates are just estimates, probabilistic rather than deterministic judgments about future events.     

Reading Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the Armenian genocide of 1915

ABSTRACT

The debate on where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey and universally known as the ‘Father of the Turks’, stood in regard to the colossal violence committed against Armenians during the First World War has become a fiercely contested part of the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process, especially within the past few years. Ulgen aims to clear away the clouds of dust surrounding Kemal by delving into his texts and examining his role in the reification of Turkish denial of the destruction of Ottoman Armenians. Based on a textual analysis of his entire corpus, including Nutuk—the Great Speech of 1927 and the master-narrative of modern Turkish history and national identity—her article examines and documents how his charismatic leadership helped to consolidate both the myth of ‘murderous Armenians’ and that of the Turks as an ‘oppressed nation’ (mazlum millet), monumentalizing both in official Turkish historiography. Ulgen argues that Kemal's portrayal of Armenians and the Armenian Question was generally consistent across the years and in various political documents, as well as being consistent with contemporary Turkish representations of the events of 1915. What really tips the balance towards Turkish innocence in Kemal's representation of the conflict is not his framing of the issue per se but the stark difference in the rhetoric he deploys in depicting Armenian and Turkish atrocities and, hence, Armenians and Turks. The undeniable authority of this discursive regime is central to the resilience of Turkish denial today.     

Immigration,redistribution, and universal suffrage

The effect of immigration on redistribution has been widely debated. This paper contributes to this debate by testing two explanations, which are that (i) immigration tends to reduce redistribution due to people’s higher levels of xenophobia, and that (ii) immigration affects redistribution because immigrants do not have the right to vote. Since the demand for redistribution depends on the (expected) gap between median voter income and mean income, immigrants affect the demand for redistribution because, as non-citizens, they do not change the median voter’s income, but, as economic stakeholders, they do affect the mean income. Four empirical consequences of (i) and (ii) are tested at the individual level. Evidence from the European Values Survey in 45 countries confirms (ii), showing that immigrants’ expected competitiveness on the labor market affects preferences for redistribution and that it is amplified when the perceived number of immigrants is high. In contrast, (i) is globally rejected since the impact of the citizens’ declared level of solidarity with immigrants tends to be weak and depends on the type of measurement or specification used.     

Signaling Alliance Commitments: Hand‐Tying and Sunk Costs in Extended Nuclear Deterrence

How can states signal their alliance commitments? Although scholars have developed sophisticated theoretical models of costly signaling in international relations, we know little about which specific policies leaders can implement to signal their commitments. This article addresses this question with respect to the extended deterrent effects of nuclear weapons. Can nuclear states deter attacks against their friends by simply announcing their defense commitments? Or must they deploy nuclear weapons on a protégé's territory before an alliance is seen as credible? Using a new dataset on foreign nuclear deployments from 1950 to 2000, our analysis reveals two main findings. First, formal alliances with nuclear states appear to carry significant deterrence benefits. Second, however, stationing nuclear weapons on a protégé's territory does not bolster these effects. The analysis yields new insights about the dynamics of “hand‐tying” and “sunk cost” signals in international politics.