Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines how the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) have defined the categories of religious, national, ethnic and racial group in order to demonstrate their protected status under the UN Genocide Convention. In early judgments dealing with genocide and crimes against humanity, the Tribunals have endorsed various contradictory formulations of categories of identity. Whereas the ICTY has adopted a subjective conception of national and religious groups, the ICTR has defined ethinc group as immutable and objectively constituted. The paper examines these contradictions as the result of the tension in international criminal justice between individual criminal responsibility and crimes of a collective nature such as genocide. In order to avoid the inherent problems with categories of national, religious racial and ethnic identity, the paper advances a political theory of genocide which focuses upon the political organizations that have planned, orchestrated and carried out the mass killing. This theory sees genocide as resulting from the political process rather than pre-existing categories of difference. This approach, it is argued, may lead to a more consistent application of international law concepts and a more accurate historical account of genocide.

Publication Type: Poster
Abstract: The research presents an exploratory and comparative analysis of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the Rwandan National Judiciary, and the Gacaca Courts. These three judicial arenas, reflecting the tripartite nature of Rwandan society (the international, the national, and the local), are involved in the process of adjudicating approximately 750,000 suspected perpetrators of genocide crimes.
The research involved three field excursions to Rwanda and Tanzania where many of the key actors in the judicial processes were interviewed, the courts were observed and various documents were collected. The research incorporated a theoretical framework that included restorative and retributive justice, liberal legalism, as well as cosmopolitan law.
Although the research is exploratory in nature, the “jury” as it were, remaining “out” as to the success of these judicial processes in achieving justice in Rwanda, a number of conclusions were forthcoming in the research. Despite the limitations and contradictions that were observed, the success of the judicial response to genocide in Rwanda may lie, not in the individual findings of guilt, or perhaps innocence, but rather in the fact that the effort, in and of itself, brings to the forefront recognition of the atrocities that took place; and with that, a move towards a more global norm wherein events such as these will not only be condemned, but addressed before they reach such epic proportions.

Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Abstract: A classification of genocidal events in multiple subcategories takes advantage of the one word, genocide, that has gained recognition and acceptance throughout the world to refer to events of mass killings of unarmed non-combatant peoples. . Lemkin succeeded in giving the world a term which has entered into the everyday language of people, journalists and legal practitioners as no other word has succeeded in doing. A multiple classification combines an overarching generic definition of genocide as mass killing of unarmed civilians with an objective description of the detailed phenomenology of each genocidal event in its specific variations is that it uses the word.

A multiple classification of genocides allows for—
• placing an event in more than one subcategory
• easier shifting of an event to another subcategory as new information comes in
• linking classification of an event to empirical data sources
• inclusion in a much broader and more detailed classification system
• freeing oneself from the provocative question, “Is it really genocide?” to categorize events differentially in subcategories that stay close to the observable facts of each event
• incorporating more easily new and novel means, methods and models of genocide.
• incorporating confounding situations where a present or past victim also appears as a perpetrator.

No case of masses of murdered dead bodies of unarmed civilians should fail to have a name that places it in a responsible context of genocide. A multiple classification records first of all the FACTS of an event. The category titles chosen for an event grow more out of the facts than out of political or other personal conceptions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Empirical research confirms that genocides, that is the deliberate mass killing of civilians, frequently occur in the context of civil wars. The main theoretical mechanism offered to explain the genocide-war nexus, a security threat, is usually defined in