Turkey: the attempted coup and its troubling aftermath

The military coup attempted in Turkey on 15 July 2016 fizzled out quickly. But President Tayyip Erdogan has accused a political rival, exiled Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, and his followers of engineering the coup without substantiation, and is using it as a pretext to purge the government, judiciary and military. This reaction could lead to sustained domestic instability that would strain Turkey's international relations, exacerbate its democratic deficit and damage its social fabric.     

The Abolition of the Death Penalty in Rwanda

This paper argues that Rwanda’s decision to abolish the death penalty should be viewed in a wider context rather than as a mere result of top–down pressure from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Part I traces the creation of the ICTR and the breakdown of negotiations as a result of the exclusion of the death penalty from the ICTR’s jurisdiction. It then outlines Rwanda’s efforts to prosecute the hundreds of thousands of individuals accused of committing genocide-related crimes and notes the limited and steadily decreasing role the death penalty actually played within Rwanda. Part II discusses Rwanda’s legislation abolishing the death penalty and argues that both international pressure and local historical and political forces influenced the decision. Part III situates Rwanda’s story within a growing paradox of excluding the death penalty from international criminal tribunals for the most serious crimes while national jurisdictions maintain it. It concludes that as in Rwanda, any perceived or potential impact of international criminal law in national jurisdictions must be measured in light of local circumstances.

The logic of anti-Zionism: Soviet elites in the aftermath of the Six-Day War

Despite the opening of Soviet archives, and the surge in scholarly interest in anti-Zionism, scholars have not used declassified archive documents to shed new light on Soviet anti-Zionism in the wake of the Six-Day War. Based on such documents, Gjerde’s article challenges a view of post-1967 Soviet anti-Zionism that has been prevalent since it emerged during the Cold War: that it represented a ‘disguised’ form of antisemitism that Soviet leaders used as a political tool. To the contrary, Gjerde argues, the archive documents suggest Soviet anti-Zionism was more than a propaganda invention. Within higher Soviet echelons, a particular logic existed that fostered a view of ‘Zionism’ as an immense, conspiratorial threat to the Soviet Union. In one sense, this logic grew out of a more general tendency to view nonconformity as conspiracy: the Soviets had established extremely narrow boundaries for what constituted acceptable Jewish identity; and, when some Soviet Jews began to voice nationalist sentiments after the Six-Day War, Soviet leaders saw this expression of nonconformity as essentially a hostile act, warranting severe counter-measures. This is not to say Soviet anti-Zionism was not antisemitic but rather that to explain it merely as a propaganda tool is to ignore much of the complexity of its emergence.     

Building a Repressive Peace: The Case of Post-Genocide Rwanda

Abstract

Security, economic recovery, democracy and statebuilding are seen as tenets of post-conflict peacebuilding in the academic literature. In Rwanda, 15 years of post-genocide peace were built through security, economic recovery and statebuilding, but without democratisation. The result was a repressive peace. The Rwandan case suggests that post-conflict peacebuilding does not require democracy; that elections can reinforce authoritarian tendencies; and that statebuilding can lead to a repressive peace. It also suggests that the repressive peace can be durable, at least in the short to medium term.     

Studying Agaciro: Moving Beyond Wilsonian Interventionist Knowledge Production on Rwanda

Twenty years after the end of the Rwandan genocide, knowledge production on the small country of a thousand hills remains a clamorous battle ground of post- and decolonial power and influence. This essay critically engages with the knowledge production on Rwanda in the West by conceptualizing it as a Wilsonian intervention in the post-colony: paternalistically well-intended at the service of the peace, democracy and free trade liberal triad, while at the same time silencing, self-contradictory and potentially counterproductive. The Wilsonian interventionist form of knowledge production is coated in a language of critical engagement and care. At the same time it is and allows for a continuous external engagement in view of this Wilsonian triad—a highly particularist view on the good life, cast in universal terms. As a former journalist and a researcher from the Belgian Rwandan diaspora and building on a decolonial research strategy, in this essay I reflect on potentially different avenues to produce and consume knowledge on the country. I do this by discussing the challenges and creative opportunities of a recently started research project on Agaciro (self-worth): a philosophy and public policy in post-genocide Rwanda rooted in its precolonial past, centred on the ideals of self-determination, dignity and self-reliance. Rather than inscribing itself firmly into the canon that aims at informing on Rwanda, this research project seeks to contribute to a different mode of imagining, studying and enacting sovereignty in today's academic and political world, both permeated by the hegemonic principle of the responsibility to protect (R2P).     

Organic purity and the role of anthropology in Cambodia and Rwanda

Straus investigates the ideology of two genocidal regimes in the developing world: the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Hutu Power in Rwanda. Although the regimes were quite different - one Communist, the other nationalist - he argues that their ideals converged around a notion of organic purity. Both regimes pursued extraordinary violence to meet the ideal: mass destruction was a method to achieve organic purity. Straus further contends that anthropological writings provided the necessary ideational building blocks for this ideal. In promoting a violent return to a mythic past, both murderous regimes embraced the images and concepts of European archaeology and ethnography.     

Turnout and weather disruptions: Survey evidence from the 2012 presidential elections in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy

This paper examines the rational choice reasoning that is used to explain the correlation between low voter turnout and the disruptions caused by weather related phenomena in the United States. Using in-person as well as phone survey data collected in New York City where the damage and disruption caused by Hurricane Sandy varied by district and even by city blocks, we explore, more directly than one can with aggregate data, whether individuals who were more affected by the disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy were more or less likely to vote in the 2012 Presidential Election that took place while voters still struggled with the devastation of the hurricane and unusually low temperatures. Contrary to the findings of other scholars who use aggregate data to examine similar questions, we find that there is no difference in the likelihood to vote between citizens who experienced greater discomfort and those who experienced no discomfort even in non-competitive districts. We theorize that this is in part due to the resilience to costs and higher levels of political engagement that vulnerable groups develop under certain institutional conditions.     

The rise of populist parties in the aftermath of a massive corruption scandal

Public Choice - Populism is on the rise in Europe and America, and understanding its origins and evolution is becoming increasingly important. In this study, I investigate the effects of the...     

A Case of Moral Heroism: Sympathy,Personal Identification,and Mortality in Rwanda

What sort of person chooses to remain in a place like Rwanda when an easy exit is offered, when leaving seems the only safe or sane option, and when one is not directly connected to the would-be victims? And how does this person come to develop a circle of care that is expansive enough to include those who are radically Other? In what follows, I consider these questions through a detailed examination of the recent example of Paul Rusesabagina, the Hutu hotel manager in Kigali, Rwanda, who sheltered more than a thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu refugees during the hundred-day genocide. I argue that Rusesabagina was primarily motivated by an awareness of his own mortality, his personal history, a desire to distance himself from the negative behavior of Hutu like himself, and a strong identification with the Tutsi refugees under his protection.