Defining the limits of the North Korean Human Rights Act: A security and legal perspective

The introduction of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 (HR 4011 or the Act) was hailed by many in the U.S. Congress as a significant and much-needed legislative effort that would substantially improve the human rights conditions of North Korea, considered to be one of the most unpredictable and undemocratic regimes in the world today. The passage of HR 4011 effectively marked a new and notable phase within U.S. foreign policy, in which the issue of human rights was directly linked to the issue of North Korean nuclear non-proliferation in a Helsinki-style framework. Relating to the Act, this paper argues from cross-cultural, security, and legal perspectives that HR 4011 may encounter specific limitations, which may hinder the Act from reaching its stated objectives of furthering “respect for and protection of fundamental human rights in North Korea” and “to promote a more durable humanitarian solution to the plight of North Korean refugees.” Although improving human rights is a fundamentally important issue, linking human rights with DPRK nuclear non-proliferation through HR 4011’s explicit Helsinki-style approach may exacerbate rather than eradicate North Korean human rights violations as well as the DPRK’s ongoing nuclear standoff with the international community.     

Total War and Genocide: Reflections on the Second World War

This paper draws on the findings of a series of international conferences on the question of “total war” in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to investigate possible connections between “total war” and the problem of genocide. Both “total war” and genocide appear to have reached a terrible culmination in the years 1937‐1945, raising the question of the connection between the two phenomena. This paper considers the usefulness of concepts such as “total war” and “genocide” as social‐scientific ideal types, before going on to reflect on the state of research on the linkage between Nazi Germany's drive for “total war” and its implementation of policies of genocide.     

Defining Interests: Disambiguation and the Need for New Distinctions?

This article notes the systemic lack of conceptual clarity in the social sciences and attempts to illustrate the adverse consequences by closer examination of the particular example of the interest group field. It indicates the significant ambiguities implicit in the term. Not all policy-influencing organisations are interest groups as normally understood, but because there is a lack of an appropriate label the term interest group is used by default. The article seeks to distinguish between interest groups and other policy relevant bodies—often corporations or institutions. It finds disadvantages in adopting a functional interpretation of the interest group term (i.e. any organisation trying to influence public policy). While the wider range of organisations are crucial in understanding the making of public policy, it is confusing to assume that this wider population are all interest groups. The article instead advances the complementary notions of pressure participant, policy participant and interest group. This slightly expanded repertoire of terms avoids conflating important distinctions, and, in Sartori's term permits 'disambiguation'. The core assumption is that the search for comparative data and exploration of normative questions implies some harmonisation in the interest group currency.     

Genocide yet again: Scenes of Rwanda and Ethical Witness in the Human Rights Memoir

This article investigates three recent human rights memoirs that chronicle the Rwandan genocide of 1994: Emergency Sex (and other desperate measures): True Stories from a War Zone, Shake Hands with the Devil: the failure of humanity in Rwanda, and The Zanzibar Chest: a memoir of love and war. I use these memoirs to explore the complexities of bearing witness to ethnic violence and war as an autobiographical subject shaped by the memory of historical atrocity — as a besieged self in traumatic occupations of the UN protector (Roméo Dallaire), lawyer (Kenneth Cain), and war correspondent (Aidan Hartley). Finally, I suggest that the authors of these memoirs are secondary witnesses, claimants to ethical truths and writers of atrocity testimony that complicate the burgeoning life‐telling compulsion of what is and who can claim to be a genocide victim. “Your mind with time, in fact, doesn't erase things that are traumas. It makes them clearer. They become digitally clearer and then you are able to sit back and all of a sudden have every individual scene come to you instead of the massive blur of many scenes I saw every day. The accumulation of the spirits that would come to you at night in the form of eyes, thousands of eyes, some mad, some simply there, and others bewildered, innocent children and adults, all that accumulated to the fact that I simply totally broke down”. (Roméo Dallaire) “What's true is that we didn't understand at the time the full magnitude of what was happening. I was an ant walking over the rough hide of an elephant. I had no idea of the scale of what I was witnessing. And when I did become aware I discovered Rwanda was way beyond my limited talents as a correspondent”. (Aidan Hartley, The Zanzibar Chest) “I don't know who saved the honor of mankind during my time in the field, but I do know that an ancestral memory of tyranny commands me not to keep silent. There is no ambiguity here. I am a witness. I have a voice. I have to write it down”. (Kenneth Cain, Emergency Sex)     

Unspeakable Pasts as Limit Events: The Holocaust, Genocide, and the Stolen Generations

This article examines the role of testimony in the production of the memory of the Holocaust and the practice of forcible removals in Australia as "limit events". A "limit event" is an event or practice of such magnitude and profound violence that its effects rupture the otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy and so-called civilising tendencies that underlie the constitution of political and moral community. The references are the stories of removal collated in Bringing Them Home , and eyewitness testimonies from the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. By situating the stolen generations and the Eichmann trial as limit events, I argue that the effects of witnessing and story-telling exposed a cultural semantics of what was speakable and unspeakable in the narratives of judging historical injustice and remembering past traumas.     

Defining Folklore: Mestizo and Indigenous Identities on the Move

This article analyses how the performance of folkloric music and dance defines and redefines ethnic/racial distinctions and identities in the Andes. It focuses on the promotional activities of urban-based institutions in Cusco called instituciones culturales, particularly how these activities have shaped folkloric performance. The article calls attention to the continuing importance of race as a central category of social differentiation, showing how folkloric performances embody ethnic/racial identities.     

Turkey and Iran: limits of a stable relationship

Throughout the twentieth century, Turkey and Iran have enjoyed peaceful, if not always cordial relations. The Cold War strategic orientations of these two neighbours solidified that relationship. The Iranian Revolution posed the first major challenge to the stability of the Turco‐Iranian relations. However, throughout the 1980s Turkish and Iranian officials adroitly managed their differences, though they did not succeed in resolving them. During the 1990s, the pressures and polarities impinging upon Turco‐Iranian relations have both multiplied and intensified. Ranging from the exertion of US influence on Turkey, to the changing political dynamics in Turkey and Iran, Turco‐Iranian relations today rest on unsteady ground. Although the exact course which Turco‐Iranian relations will take remains unclear, there is reason to be concerned about its current state. For, to a significant degree, the stability and prosperity of the Middle East region depends to a significant degree on maintaining the stability of Turco‐Iranian relations.     

Social democracy and globalisation: the limits of social democracy in historical perspective

This article argues that social democratic governments throughout the 20^th century faced internal and international constraints arising from the operation of capitalist economies and that the evidence for a qualitative deepening of such constraints since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system is far from unequivocal. Financial markets were already big enough and fast enough to deter such governments from the pursuit of egalitarian policies in the interwar years or to destabilise them if they ignored the warning signs. This article also shows that the efficacy of Keynesian macroeconomic policy in the Golden Age has been exaggerated and that the problem of short–term movements of speculative capital persisted throughout this era in a country such as Britain. Keynesianism never worked in the face of mass unemployment and it is misleading to suggest that its breakdown in the 1970s somehow robbed social democracy of the policy tools that had maintained full employment in the 1950s and 1960s. A host of additional problems have indeed beset social democratic governments since 1973, but the analysis of such problems is hindered rather than helped by much of the literature which invokes economic globalisation. Globalisation theory is in need of further specification before it can be useful and arguments about the economic consequences of globalisation since 1973 need to distinguish its effects from those of the many conjunctural problems of the period as well as the policies that important agencies have pursued in search of solutions to them.     

The basic law and the limits of toleration

Germany's Basic Law is claimed to represent a liberal‐democratic constitution. This article seeks to examine whether a constitution that permits the prohibition of parties (Art. 21.2 GG) and the suspension of individual rights (Art. 18 GG) deserves this label. The examination is based on the analytical framework provided by the liberal concept of toleration. For toleration to be a meaningful concept within liberal theory, it has to imply certain limits. The author concludes that the main purpose of Arts. 21.2 and 18 GG is to serve as a reminder of these limits of toleration while the practice of the Federal Constitutional Court reflects the liberal constraints on enforcing the limits of toleration.     

A new international order: Lessons of Kosovo

An examination of how the worsening AIDS epidemic in Africa has been used to construct a simplistic and racial view of Africa in the West as a continent that is homogenous, backward, sexually permissive, unpredictable and in need of control, advice and help from outside.