Overlooked and Overshadowed: The Case of Burundi

In east-central Africa, nestled between Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda is Burundi. From the onset of independence in 1961, Burundi has had a history of internal armed conflicts, ethnic tensions and civil unrest in the form of crimes against humanity, massive and systematic rape, and other gross human rights violations that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Nonetheless, there has been relatively little attention paid to these types of crimes by criminologists. Political discourse and subsequent media reports suggest that the cause of the violence in Burundi is rooted in reappearing ethnic tensions between two ethnic groups. Yet, the origins and continued enactment of the conflict is far more complex. In this paper, the authors draw upon the extant state crime literature to both conceptually frame, and theoretically illuminate, the crimes against humanity and other gross human rights violations that have occurred.