Rape, traditionally a spoil of war, became a weapon of war in the ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia. The ICTY Kunarac court responded by transforming wartime rape from an ignored crime into a crime against humanity. In its judgment, the court argued that the rapists violated the Muslim women’s right to sexual self-determination. Announcing this right to sexual integrity, the court transformed women’s vulnerability from an invitation to abuse into a mark of human dignity. This close reading of (...) the trial, guided by the phenomenological themes of the lived body and ambiguity, feminist critiques of the autonomous subject and the liberal sexual/social contract, critical legal theory assessments of human rights law and institutions, and psychoanalytic analyses of the politics of desire, argues that the court, by validating women’s epistemic authority (their right to establish the meaning of their experience of rape) and affirming the dignity of the vulnerable body (thereby dethroning the autonomous body as the embodiment of dignity), shows us that human rights instruments can be used to combat the epidemic of wartime rape if they are read as de-legitimating the authority of the masculine autonomous subject and the gender codes it anchors. (shrink)

A little more than a decade ago, a powerful short book appeared with what was then the provocative title: Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Croatia. It was written by Beverly Allen. In that book she introduced the term "genocidal rape" to describe rapes that were done as policy for the purpose of genocide by Serb military forces in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Croatia in the early 1990s. This chapter examines the paradox that Allen articulated and places (...) it in the context of the general question of how war rape can be genocidal, whether aimed at pregnancy or not. Drawing on Allen's amazing insight that sperm so used can and should be regarded as a weapon of biological warfare, it discusses a way to show how rape aimed at enforced pregnancy could indeed be genocidal. (shrink)

Debra Bergoffen’s Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape shows us beautifully what is gained by considering rape as a consequence of genocide. What gets lost here, in relation to considering cases of rape that are not the result of such, such as gang rape, “mass rape,” or other instances of rape? Is rape qua rape a human rights violation of a sort that is articulated within the context of the “right to (...) sexual integrity”? Can a case be made, even in “non-wartime” societies where rape occurs systematically as an instance of patriarchy and misogyny, that rape is a human rights violation of the right to sexual self-determination? Or is it the case that the conditions of wartime rape merit a different set of considerations in order to locate it as a human rights violation? My comments attempt to think through some of these questions with Bergoffen. (shrink)

International criminal tribunals established by the UN Security Council in the 1990s have been widely acclaimed as active participants in the modern system of dynamic criminal justice. One of their best known achievements is the prosecution of rape and sexual assaults. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) set an example for other tribunals to follow. By interpreting a variety of international laws, the community of international legal professionals has (...) been able to shift the prevailing understanding of rape and sexual violence away from that of an “unfortunate byproducts of war.” Not only has the epistemic community of legal professionals been able to end impunity for these crimes, but case-law of international tribunals has become a basis for subsequent trials at quasi-international tribunals. Decisions of the tribunals have been instrumental in drafting the Statute of the International Criminal Court and can be regarded as an example of the formation of new international norms by means of judicial decisions. (shrink)

The trial of Jean-Paul Akayesu is by far the most well known and widely discussed case at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a distinction that can be attributed to the fact that it was groundbreaking for several reasons. However, with regard to the importance of this trial both as a precedent for subsequent ICTR cases and within the broader context of international jurisprudence, its most significant contribution has undoubtedly been the recognition and prosecution of rape as a means (...) of perpetrating genocide. The task of collecting admissible evidence to that end was heavily impacted by the necessity of interpreting and translating witness testimonies from their original language of expression, Kinyarwanda, into the working languages of the Tribunal, French and English. The multiple challenges associated with this translation process concerned not only questions of semantic equivalence of specific lexical terms. They also highlighted the considerable ‘cultural collision’ that occurred in the courtroom between the Rwandan witnesses and the international judiciary. This article elucidates the complex task faced by the courtroom interpreters in navigating these linguistic and sociocultural considerations underpinning the evocations of rape within the evidentiary framework of the Akayesu trial. (shrink)

This paper discusses, within the context of analytical theory, some of the implications when rape is subsumed within the international crime of genocide and concludes that this type of enquiry is essential for creating a clearer framework to address and understand this violation. From the analysis undertaken, two critical questions become apparent: a) Does compatibility exist when rape is subsumed within the category of a group violation (genocide), if rape is constructed as a violation of an individual’s (...) sexual autonomy? i b) Is the link between rape and genocide necessarily problematic within this notion of autonomy for the individual victim of rape? The process unfolds within an analytical theoretical approach that touches upon the current concept of human rights with its focus on the individual. Although the key element is the individual, the concept of human rights also creates a space, albeit limited and at times controversial, for the group. As such, this paper identifies some of the theoretical implications that emerge once rape is subsumed within the international crime of genocide, which is defined as a violation committed against particular groups. (shrink)

One of the most significant shifts in current thinking on war and gender is the recognition that rape in wartime is not a simple by-product of war, but often a planned and targeted policy. For many feminists ‘rape as a weapon of war’ provides a way to articulate the systematic, pervasive, and orchestrated nature of wartime sexual violence that marks it as integral rather than incidental to war. This recognition of rape as a weapon of war has (...) taken on legal significance at the Rwandan and Yugoslav Tribunals where rape has been prosecuted as a crime against humanity and genocide. In this paper, I examine how the Rwanda Tribunal’s record of judgments conceives of rape enacted as an instrument of the genocide. I consider in particular how the Tribunal’s conception of ‘rape as a weapon of war’ shapes what can be known about sexual violence and gender in the Rwandan genocide and what cannot, the categories of victims legally recognised and those that are not, and the questions pursued, and those foreclosed, about the patterns of violence before and during the genocide. (shrink)

International law has recently recognized that sexual atrocities can be acts of genocide. This precedent was pioneered through a landmark lawsuit in New York against Radovan Karadžić, head of the Bosnian Serbs (Kadic v. Karadzic, 1993–2000), a case in which I played a central role. I argue that we may situate this development philosophically in relation to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She aims to secure a better understanding of genocide than was achieved (...) at the Nuremberg Trials (1945) and at the Eichmann trial (1961). Arendt claims that these trials were limited by formalism because they applied familiar paradigms onto these new experiences in a manner that obscured what was distinctive about them and that demanded original thinking and a new paradigm. Nuremberg obscured genocide by miscasting it as a traditional “war crime,” a problem that the Jerusalem court exposed butcould have better clarified. Through a first-hand account, I show how we too had to secure a new paradigm by treating the facts on their own terms and coining the crime as “genocidal rape.” We had to wrest this paradigm from a prevailing approach that also formally applied the category of “war crimes” onto these experiences in a way that obscured them and interfered with justice. (shrink)

Rather than focusing on the legal and political questions that surround genocidal rape, in this paper I treat a vital area of inquiry that has received much less attention: the moral significance of genocidal rape. My aim is to augment existing moral accounts of rape in order to address the specific contexts of genocidal rape. I move beyond understanding rape primarily as a violation of an individual's interests or agential abilities. The account (...) I offer builds on these approaches (as well as on a pluralist approach), by arguing that rape, as a moral injury, negatively affects the very human dignity of victims. My account also emphasizes the relational harm that marks genocidal rape. (shrink)

Abstract: The optimum definition of the term "genocide" has been hotly contested almost since the term was coined. Definitional boundaries determine which acts are covered and excluded and thus to a great extent which cases will benefit from international attention, intervention, prosecution, and reparation. The extensive legal, political, and scholarly discussions prior to this article have typically (1) assumed "genocide" to be a fixed social object and attempted to define it as precisely as possible or (2) assumed the need for (...) a fixed convention and sought to stipulate the range of events that should be denoted by the term. Even if its meaning is a matter of convention, however, "genocide" is not a fixed object but varies by context and evolves in methods and forms over time. In fact, as relevant laws, legal interpretations, and political commitments develop, so do would-be perpetrators modify what genocide is in order to avoid political and legal consequences. This article advances an approach to a definition of "genocide" that allows even legal definitions to keep pace with this evolutionary process. (shrink)

The policy of genocide carried out by Armenian nationalists against Azerbaijanis has a history of more than 200 years. The goal of this insidious policy was the expulsion of Azerbaijani people from their historical lands and the creation of a mythical state of “Great Armenia” in these territories. On March 31, 1918, under the leadership of the Dashnaktsutyun party with the help of the Red Army of Soviet Russia, the Azerbaijani population of Baku was subjected to genocide. The corpses of (...) 57 Muslim women, whose ears and noses were cut off, and their bellies were torn open, were found in one of the neighborhoods in Baku. Armenians threw people alive into water wells, burning ovens, and oil wells, ripped apart pregnant women's bellies with bayonets, killed children with bayonets, nailed babies to walls, raped women, young girls, and old women. They hung men upside down by their legs, cut them in half with swords, crucified some of them on wooden beds, wrapped them in carpets and rugs and burned them alive, cut off people's hands and feet, and forced them to eat their own flesh under bayonets. Wild Armenian gangs burned Muslim clerics in the fire of bonfires lit from the Koran, the holy book of Islam. This was the true face of the Armenian nationalists who loudly shouted about “self-determination”, “autonomy” and “genocide”. The cruelty of Andranik, who made “necklaces” from children’s eyes, and other Armenians, knew no bounds. In March 1918, up to 20 thousand Azerbaijanians in Baku, and in 1917-1920 on the territory of Azerbaijan, more than 400 thousand Azerbaijani people were subjected to “genocide” by the Armenians. As the world ignores these atrocities, they are increasing. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed rape and sexual violence used on such a massive scale and often in a widespread and systematic program that the international community has had to recognize that rape and sexual violence are not just war crimes but might be crimes against humanity or even genocide. I suggest that just war theory, while limited in its applicability to mass rape, might nevertheless offer some framework for making the determination of when sexual violence and (...) class='Hi'>rape constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide. In addition, just war theory can provide the normative justification individual soldiers need to resist orders and actions that demonstrate egregious moral breakdown as found in instances of mass rape and systematic use of sexual violence, and just war criteria demonstrate that the use of rape and sexual violence in war time can never be legitimated, especially in the case of prisoner interrogation. (shrink)

Over the last several decades there has been an attempt to gender genocide by focusing on sexual as well as lethal violence during the Holocaust. While there has been tremendous consideration of women's experience of rape and sexual abuse during the Holocaust, the rape of men had not been previously engaged as a matter of study or archival investigation. This article is the first to study the rape of Jewish men and boys during the Holocaust through survivor (...) testimonies and theorize the implications these testimonies of male sexual victimization have for our understanding of sexual violence and rape more broadly. (shrink)

In my paper, I document a “travel” journey of concept formation and its concrete expression in law, which also constituted a literal travel journey across continents. Through poetic-hermeneutical approaches to language, guided by previously existing concepts stemming from experiences of the Holocaust, communism, and African-American feminist analyses of rape as an attack on a racial/ethnic group, a previously invisible domain of the human condition was charted. Throughout history, sexual atrocities have been committed within the context of wars, but their (...) weaponisation as acts of genocide remained unarticulated. This changed in the 1990s with Serbia-Yugoslavia’s genocidal wars against its neighbours (Editorial comment: The author uses the term Serbia-Yugoslavia to refer to the entity that succeeded the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after Croatia and Slovenia declared independence on June 25th, 1991. The SFRY up to that point consisted of the six republics Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia (including the so-called autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina), and Slovenia. Further declarations of independence by Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina on April 27, 1992, left only Serbia and Montenegro who the same day declared themselves to be the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). In 2003, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was reconstituted as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, which existed until Montenegro and Serbia declared their independence (on June 3rd and June 5th, 2006, respectively)). I sketch the genesis of the concept of sexual atrocities as genocide in connection with my personal journey and how it guided legal prosecution of this “new” crime. My own travel-experience began with my association with Asja Armanda, and her discovery of coordinated mass rapes, when she came to the aid of survivors fleeing the Serbian attacks on Croatia, crimes she attempted to bring to international attention to prevent their expansion into Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Testimonials reached me in the U.S. as well. I went to Croatia to join Armanda, where we named the crime “sexual atrocities as genocide.” On the basis of this new concept, we filed a lawsuit in New York against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, pioneering this crime’s recognition under international law. I conclude with philosophical questions that Putin’s similar genocidal attack on Ukraine raises today. (shrink)

Widespread and systematic rape pervaded both the genocides in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992 and in Rwanda in 1994. In response to these conflicts, the Yugoslav Tribunal (ICTY) and the Rwandan Tribunal (ICTR) were created and charged with meting justice for crimes committed, including rape. Nevertheless, the two tribunals differ in their relative success in administering justice for crimes of rape. Addressing rape has been a consistent element of the ICTY prosecution strategy, which resulted in gender-sensitive investigative procedures, (...) higher frequencies of rape indictments, and more successful prosecutions. In contrast, rape has not been a central focus of the ICTR prosecution strategy, which resulted in a sporadic approach to gender-sensitive investigative procedures, inconsistent rape indictments, and few successful prosecutions. What accounts for this disparity in rape prosecutions between the Rwandan and Yugoslav tribunals? Building off the existing literature that discusses factors such as legal instruments and resource capacity of the tribunal, this article argues that transnational advocacy helped generate the necessary political will to adopt and implement legal norms regarding crimes of sexual violence at the ICTY and the ICTR. Following the importance of transnational advocacy as agents of norm change, this paper also explores the antecedent conditions of advocacy mobilization that conditioned different levels of mobilization vis-à-vis the ICTY and the ICTR, including media attention and framing, connections and interest match with local groups, and geopolitical context. (shrink)

This study seeks to understand a diaspora community narrative of rape and abduction suffered during the genocidal massacre of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire and its aftermath. Based on interviews with 50 Aramean, Assyrian and Chaldean migrants in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, whose families are from the village of Bote, known as one of the ‘killing fields’ in southeast Turkey, the article explores the ways in which descendants remember the ‘forgotten genocide’ of Aramean, Assyrian and Chaldean communities (...) in 1915. The research reveals that the descendants of survivors make sense of the sexual violence experienced in Bote mainly through a religious narrative and that, for them, the genocide is, in spite of all the sufferings the males had to go through, a feminized event. In their gendercide narrative, the abducted and raped women are identified as the ‘heroines’ of the genocide. (shrink)

Increasingly, scholarship on moral injury is expanding to include non‐military personnel, and considers a violation of bodily integrity—for example, of civilian women who are targeted for sexual violence in warfare—as a particularly egregious harm. Moral injury discourse also extends beyond the individual to the social context in which moral injury arises, its relational effects, and its utterly devastating impact on personhood, an impact frequently characterized as a “soul wound.” The intersection of genocidal rape—both as an individual and a (...) group harm—with religion, as facilitating moral injury and restorative “soul repair,” exemplifies these trends. Although moral injury research rarely addresses the detrimental influences of religion or references the “soul” with precision, the discourse of moral injury does provide an opportunity for exploring the relationship between personhood and agency from the perspectives of those who inflict and are subjected to harm. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAnxious individuals report disproportionately negative expectations concerning the future, termed the negative expectancy bias. In contrast, ageing is associated with an inflated expectancy for positive future events. A recent study [Steinman, S. A., Smyth, F. L., Bucks, R. S., MacLeod, C., & Teachman, B. A.. Anxiety-linked expectancy bias across the adult lifespan. Cognition and Emotion, 27, 345–355. doi:10.1080/02699931.2012.711743] found using an interpretation bias task, a negative expectancy bias in young adults and positive expectancy bias in older adults with high trait (...) anxiety. Extending this, the current study examined expectancy bias for positive, negative and ambiguously emotionally toned information in younger and older adults with clinical levels of depression and anxiety to community control groups, thus allowing examination of both disorder status and age on biases. Clinical participants reported a pervasive tendency to expect negative events relative to positive regardless o... (shrink)

There is limited knowledge about sleep in adolescents with elevated levels of anxiety treated within primary health care settings, potentially resulting in sleep problems not being sufficiently addressed by primary health care workers. In the current study self-reported anxiety, insomnia, sleep onset latency, sleep duration, and depressive symptoms were assessed in 313 adolescents referred to treatment for anxiety within primary health care. Results showed that 38.1% of the adolescents met criteria for insomnia, 34.8% reported short sleep duration, and 83.1% reported (...) long sleep onset latency. Total anxiety symptoms were related to all sleep variables after controlling for age and sex. Furthermore, all anxiety symptom sub-types were associated with insomnia and sleep onset latency, whereas most anxiety subtypes were associated with sleep duration. Adolescents’ depressive symptoms accounted for most of the anxiety-sleep associations, emphasizing the importance of depressive symptoms for sleep. However, anxiety was associated with insomnia and sleep onset latency also among youth with low levels of depressive symptoms. The findings suggests that primary health care workers should assess sleep duration, sleep onset latency, and insomnia in help-seeking adolescents with anxiety. (shrink)

Rather than focusing on political and legal debates surrounding attempts to determine if and when genocidal rape has taken place in a particular setting, this essay turns instead to a crucial, yet neglected area of inquiry: the moral significance of genocidal rape, and more specifically, the nature of the harms that constitute the culpable wrongdoing that genocidal rape represents. In contrast to standard philosophical accounts, which tend to employ an individualistic framework, this essay offers (...) a situated understanding of harm that features the importance of interdependence and relationality and that conceptualizes harms as embodied and contextual. The paper ultimately reveals what is distinctive about this particular crime of sexual violence by exploring the logic of genocidal rape: genocidal rape involves the harm of forced self-betrayal unleashed relationally, causing victims as representatives of their group to participate inadvertently in the destruction of that group. (shrink)

Evaluative and normative terms and concepts are often said to be "essentially contestable". This notion has been used in political and legal theory and applied ethics to analyse disputes concerning the proper usage of terms like democracy, freedom, genocide, rape, coercion, and the rule of law. Many philosophers have also thought that essential contestability tells us something important about the evaluative in particular. Gallie (who coined the term), for instance, argues that the central structural features of essentially contestable concepts (...) secure their evaluativeness. I'll argue that these (widely held) central features are exemplified by many evaluative and non-evaluative terms alike, owing to more general factors (such as multidimensionality) which have nothing in particular to do with being evaluative. The role of these factors in semantic interpretation is subject to a certain kind of "metasemantic" disputes which have the features of the disputes characteristically admitted by essentially contestable concepts (whether evaluative or not) and which can be similarly substantive and worthwhile. In closing I'll discuss how my argument shows that our understanding of evaluative disagreement needs refinement. The overall upshot is that essential contestability shows nothing deep or distinctive about the evaluative in particular. (shrink)

Victim's Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights takes on a set of questions suggested by the worldwide persistence of human rights abuse and the prevalence of victims' stories in human rights campaigns, truth commissions, and international criminal tribunals: What conceptions of victims are presumed in contemporary human rights discourse? How do conventional narrative templates fail victims of human rights abuse and resist raising novel human rights issues? What is empathy, and how can victims frame their stories to overcome empathetic (...) obstacles and promote commitment to human rights? How can victims' stories be used ethically in the service of human rights? The book addresses these concerns by analyzing the rhetorical resources for and constraints on victims' ability to articulate their stories and by clarifying how their stories can contribute to enlarged understandings of human rights protections and deepened commitments to realizing human rights. It theorizes the normative content that victims' stories can convey and the bearing of that normative content on human rights. Throughout the book, published victims' stories-including stories of torture, slavery, genocide, rape in wartime, and child soldiering-are analyzed in conjunction with philosophical arguments. This book mobilizes philosophical theory to illuminate victims' stories and appeals to victims' stories to enrich the philosophy of human rights. (shrink)

This essay explores the dynamics of shame as they relate to genocidal rape in Debra Bergoffen’s work, as well as her diagnosis of the traffic in women’s bodies that motivates genocidal rape and is responsible for its deployment as a weapon of war.

RESUMEN: El presente artículo tiene por objetivo analizar desde una perspectiva feminista las similitudes y diferencias existentes entre los Tribunales Ad-hoc para Ruanda y la Antigua Yugoslavia relacionados con los crímenes relativos a violencia sexual y violación. Analizando los componentes que afectan la determinación de dichos crímenes como son el consentimiento y el contexto y su tipificación internacional: Genocidio y lesa humanidad. ABSTRACT: The present article aims to analyze from a feminist point of view the similarities and differences between the (...) Ad-hoc Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia related sexual violence and rape crimes. PALABRAS CLAVE: Ruanda, Ex-Yugoslavia, violencia sexual, lesa humanidad, genocidio, violación, consentimiento, contexto. KEYWORDS: Rwanda, Ex- Yugoslavia, sexual violence, crimes against humanity, genocide, rape, contentment, coercion, context. (shrink)

This response to Falguni Sheth’s and Ann Murphy’s readings of my book, Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape: Affirming the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body, pursues the questions they raise regarding the domestic implications of establishing rape as a crime against humanity, the problematic distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing, the politics of autonomy, the trafficking in shame, the relationship between violence and vulnerability, and the possibility of an ethics of vulnerability, by focusing on the disruptions created (...) by ICTY Kunarac case. These disruptions blur the distinction between wartime and peacetime rape, challenge the difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing, expose the norms of patriarchal privilege embedded in ontologies of autonomy and invulnerability, reveal the relationship between an ontology and ethics of vulnerability and show how shame, as Pharmakon, can transform the shocked conscience of humanity invoked in contemporary human rights documents into political action. (shrink)

The policy of genocide carried out by Armenian nationalists against Azerbaijanis has a history of more than 200 years. The goal of this insidious policy was the expulsion of Azerbaijani people from their historical lands and the creation of a mythical state of “Great Armenia” in these territories. On March 31, 1918, under the leadership of the Dashnaktsutyun party with the help of the Red Army of Soviet Russia, the Azerbaijani population of Baku was subjected to genocide. The corpses of (...) 57 Muslim women, whose ears and noses were cut off, and their bellies were torn open, were found in one of the neighborhoods in Baku. Armenians threw people alive into water wells, burning ovens, and oil wells, ripped apart pregnant women's bellies with bayonets, killed children with bayonets, nailed babies to walls, raped women, young girls, and old women. They hung men upside down by their legs, cut them in half with swords, crucified some of them on wooden beds, wrapped them in carpets and rugs and burned them alive, cut off people's hands and feet, and forced them to eat their own flesh under bayonets. Wild Armenian gangs burned Muslim clerics in the fire of bonfires lit from the Koran, the holy book of Islam. This was the true face of the Armenian nationalists who loudly shouted about “self-determination”, “autonomy” and “genocide”. The cruelty of Andranik, who made “necklaces” from children’s eyes, and other Armenians, knew no bounds. In March 1918, up to 20 thousand Azerbaijanians in Baku, and in 1917-1920 on the territory of Azerbaijan, more than 400 thousand Azerbaijani people were subjected to “genocide” by the Armenians. As the world ignores these atrocities, they are increasing. (shrink)

Dehumanisation is a puzzling phenomenon. Nazi propaganda likened the Jews to rats, but also portrayed them as ‘poisoners of culture’. In the Soviet Union, the Stalinist regime called opponents vermin, yet put them on show trials. During the Rwandan genocide, the Hutus identified the Tutsis with cockroaches, but nonetheless raped Tutsi women. These examples reveal tensions in the way in which dehumanisers perceive, portray and treat victims. Dehumanisation seems to require that perpetrators both deny and acknowledge the humanity of their (...) victims in certain ways. Several scholars have proposed solutions to this so-called ‘paradox of dehumanisation’ that question the usefulness of dehumanisation as a concept to explain genocidal violence, claim that dehumanisation is characterised by an unstable belief in the non-human essence of the dehumanised, or contend that dehumanisation revolves around a denial of metaphysical human status. The main aim of this article is to present a novel framework for theorising dehumanisation that offers a more straightforward solution to this paradox based on the idea that perpetrators deny their victims’ human standing in a moral sense without necessarily negating their biological human status or human subjectivity. The article illustrates this framework through examples drawn from Primo Levi’s memoirs of Auschwitz. (shrink)

Dehumanisation is a puzzling phenomenon. Nazi propaganda likened the Jews to rats, but also portrayed them as ‘poisoners of culture’. In the Soviet Union, the Stalinist regime called opponents vermin, yet put them on show trials. During the Rwandan genocide, the Hutus identified the Tutsis with cockroaches, but nonetheless raped Tutsi women. These examples reveal tensions in the way in which dehumanisers perceive, portray and treat victims. Dehumanisation seems to require that perpetrators both deny and acknowledge the humanity of their (...) victims in certain ways. Several scholars have proposed solutions to this so-called ‘paradox of dehumanisation’ that question the usefulness of dehumanisation as a concept to explain genocidal violence, claim that dehumanisation is characterised by an unstable belief in the non-human essence of the dehumanised, or contend that dehumanisation revolves around a denial of metaphysical human status. The main aim of this article is to present a novel framework for theorising dehumanisation that offers a more straightforward solution to this paradox based on the idea that perpetrators deny their victims’ human standing in a moral sense without necessarily negating their biological human status or human subjectivity. The article illustrates this framework through examples drawn from Primo Levi’s memoirs of Auschwitz. (shrink)

Alors que le Tribunal de Nuremberg n’avait pas traité spécifiquement des crimes sexuels ou du genre des victimes, depuis une vingtaine d’années, l’évolution du droit international, notamment pénal, a été marquée par une prise en compte de la dimension sexuée des crimes de guerre, des crimes contre l’humanité et des génocides. Les tribunaux pénaux internationaux pour l’ex-Yougoslavie (TPIY), celui pour le Rwanda (TPIR) et la Cour pénale internationale (CPI) ont porté une attention particulière aux violences sexuelles et aux femmes victimes (...) de guerre. Pourtant les femmes ne sont pas dans une simple relation binaire aux lois de la guerre, en position de victimes (potentielles) ou d’actrices (moins probables) de leurs violations. Elles peuvent avoir d’autres rôles d’actrices de leur élaboration ou application, à titre d’enquêtrices, procureures, avocates ou juges, témoins ou expertes. Cet état de la recherche considérera d’abord les tribunaux internationaux comme producteur et médium de la recherche sur les femmes et les lois de la guerre. Il envisagera ensuite la diversité des figures féminines, sujets ou objets de ce droit et de cette justice : juristes, criminelles, victimes ou combattantes. Significativement, des questionnements semblables se retrouvent dans ces différents cas : la « féminité » est-elle un facteur explicatif spécifique ou finalement secondaire, un stéréotype à déconstruire? Y a-t-il une continuité entre temps de paix et temps de guerre dans le rapport des femmes à la violence criminelle? La limitation des rôles féminins est-elle le produit d’un droit international étatique ou l’expression plus large d’une domination masculine dans les pratiques guerrières? (shrink)

What distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs? Is hatred a necessarily evil? Are some evils unforgivable? Are there evils we should tolerate? What can make evils hard to recognize? Are evils inevitable? How can we best respond to and live with evils? Claudia Card offers a secular theory of evil that responds to these questions and more. Evils, according to her theory, have two fundamental components. One component is reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm -- harm that makes a life indecent and impossible (...) or that makes a death indecent. The other component is culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities, such as genocides, slavery, war rape, torture, and severe child abuse, are Card's paradigms because in them these key elements are writ large. Atrocities deserve more attention than secular philosophers have so far paid them. They are distinguished from ordinary wrongs not by the psychological states of evildoers but by the seriousness of the harm that is done. Evildoers need not be sadistic:they may simply be negligent or unscrupulous in pursuing their goals. Card's theory represents a compromise between classic utilitarian and stoic alternatives (including Kant's theory of radical evil). Utilitarians tend to reduce evils to their harms; Stoics tend to reduce evils to the wickedness of perpetrators: Card accepts neither reduction. She also responds to Nietzsche's challenges about the worth of the concept of evil, and she uses her theory to argue that evils are more important than merely unjust inequalities. She applies the theory in explorations of war rape and violence against intimates. She also takes up what Primo Levi called "the gray zone", where victims become complicit in perpetrating on others evils that threaten to engulf themselves. While most past accounts of evil have focused on perpetrators, Card begins instead from the position of the victims, but then considers more generally how to respond to -- and live with -- evils, as victims, as perpetrators, and as those who have become both. (shrink)

Claudia Card had a long and distinguished career as a philosopher that began at a time when being a woman in philosophy was not an easy matter and ended much too soon with her passing in 2015. Starting with her first and still widely-cited article, “On Mercy,” she published ten monographs and edited volumes and nearly 150 articles and reviews on topics in moral, social, and political philosophy. She is is most widely known for her influential work in analytic feminist (...) philosophy and on evil. She was a pioneer in feminist and lesbian philosophy whose trailblazing work has influenced generations of philosophers; and in her 25 articles and two monographs on evil and evils such as rape, domestic violence, child abuse, war, terrorism, and genocide, she proposed a new way of understanding evil that made a profound contribution to philosophical thinking about these topics. This volume brings together eleven of her articles, including seven essays on war, genocide, and evil, and four essays on topics in feminist ethics. In addition, the volume includes nine essays by other authors that explore and expand upon Card’s philosophical legacy. This unique volume combines Card’s own mature voice with the best in recent scholarship on issues central to her own philosophical concerns. (shrink)

In international law, ‘humanitarian intervention’ refers to the use of military force by one nation or group of nations to stop genocide or other gross human rights violations in another sovereign nation. If humanitarian intervention is conceived as military in nature, it makes sense that only the most horrible, massive, and violent violations of human rights can justify intervention. Yet, that leaves many serious evils beyond the scope of legal intervention. In particular, violations of women's rights and freedoms often go (...) unchecked. To address this problem, I begin from two basic questions: When are violations of human rights sufficiently serious to require an international response of some sort? What should that response be? By re-orienting the aim and justification of international law to focus on individual autonomy rather than on peace between nations, I argue that women's rights violations other than genocide and mass rape can warrant intervention. Military intervention is often counter-productive to the aim of achieving autonomy, however. I suggest a range of responses to human rights violations that includes military intervention as one end of the spectrum, and combine this with a greater understanding of the scope of human rights violations that require international response. (shrink)

After the discovery of the anthropoid ape in Asia and in Africa, eighteenth-century Holland became the crossroads of Enlightenment debates about the human species. Material evidence about human diversity reached Petrus Camper, comparative anatomist in the Netherlands, who engaged, among many other interests, in menschkunde. Could only religious doctrine support the belief of human demarcation from animals? Camper resolved the challenges raised by overseas discoveries with his thesis of the facial angle, a theory which succeeding generations distorted and misused in (...) order to justify slavery, racism, antisemitism, and genocide. Thanks to his abundant papers in Dutch archives, Camper's ideas are restored to their original state. Eighteenth-century issues differed from those of other centuries: Did orang-utans talk like humans, walk like humans; even rape humans? What was the skin pigmentation of Adam and Eve? Did the spectrum of human physiognomies around the globe reflect the Fall of Man, the Creator's bounty, or merely bizarre beauty practices? Why did the ideal beauty of the Greeks appear to be the reverse of the Hottentots? The book contains some 50 illustrations, including apes with hiking sticks or tea cups, metamorphoses of living forms, and Apollo or Venus icons which titillated the science of man. (shrink)

In the United States, all military personnel swear to obey “the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.” Military personnel must obey orders promptly in order to facilitate effective military functioning. Yet, obedience to orders has been associated with the commission of war crimes. Military personnel of all ranks have committed torture, rape, genocide, and murder under orders. “I was just following orders” (respondaet superior) is no longer accepted as (...) a complete defense to a charge of war crimes. In the words of the Nuremberg court: “The obedience of a soldier is not the obedience of an automaton. A soldier is a reasoning agent”. This means that military personnel cannot evade responsibility for their actions under orders. But when and under what conditions should military personnel disobey orders? If obedience is sometimes morally wrong, how can obedience be a military virtue? In this chapter I argue that the only plausible conception of military obedience as a virtue is reflective obedience: obedience governed and constrained by the ends of the military profession serving a legitimate state and by the laws of armed conflict. Section 1 explains the concept of obedience and outlines the idea of virtuous obedience. Section 2 explores when the military has legitimate authority to compel obedience. Section 3 concludes by exploring the limits on obedience that derive from the military’s status as a profession and the legitimacy of the military’s authority to issue orders. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 38-58 [Access article in PDF] Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead Andrew Norris Death is most frightening, since it is a boundary. —Aristotle, Nicomachean EthicsAnd as the same thing there exists in us living and dead and the waking and the sleeping and young and old: for these things having changed round are those, and those having changed round are these. —Heraclitus, Fragment (...) 88 What is politics today? What is its relationship to the tradition from which it emerges? The questions are difficult ones to answer in part because contemporary politics seems so schizophrenic. In affluent Western countries politics is increasingly a matter of spectacle on the one hand and managed economies on the other. Hannah Arendt seems quite confirmed in her claim that the once-glorious public realm of appearance is fundamentally degraded when it is overrun by concerns more appropriate to the private realm, such as household management and gossip. If this "unnatural growth of the natural" [47] inclines us to nostalgia for a time when the two realms were more decisively separated, such nostalgia is likely intensified by the "ethnic cleansing," rape camps, and genocide that we now associate with names such as "Yugoslavia" and "Rwanda." But as improbable as any flight to the past may be, it is even less likely that the politics of that past could help us navigate the treacherous waters of our current technological society. I have in mind not only the familiar claim that the attempted genocides of our time are only made possible by quite modern forms of technology, organization, and experience, 1 but also recent scientific and "medical" advances. Consider just two: first, the corporate driven and controlled development of biotechnologies, in which huge multinationals are acquiring patents to genetic "information" such as "all human blood cells that have come from the umbilical cord of [any] newborn child." If there is any doubt that such developments will lead us to redefine the human being, these may be laid to rest by the case of John Moore, an Alaskan businessman who found his own body parts had been patented, without his knowledge, by the University of California at Los Angeles and licensed to the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Corporation [Rifkin 60-61]. So much for Locke's attempt to ground the institution of private property in the fact that "every Man has a Property in his own Person"! 2 In its place we seem to be moving [End Page 38] toward something more like the "logical synthesis of biology and economy" called for by the National Socialist Institut allemand in Paris in 1942 [Agamben, Homo Sacer 145]. A similar process of redefinition is already underway in the field of death, a phenomenon that scientists and lawyers are having a harder and harder time pinning down. Where once death was defined by the cessation of the movement of the heart and lungs, recent life support technologies have forced scientists to define death in terms of such technologies. Witness Doctor Norman Shumway's defense of the definition of death as brain death: "I'm saying that anyone whose brain is dead is dead. It is the one determinant that would be universally applicable, because the brain is the one organ that can't be transplanted" [163]. By implication, if and when technology is developed that allows for brain transplants, even those whose brains are "dead" will be brought back to some kind of life, perhaps as organ farms for others who are less ambiguously alive.Giorgio Agamben, from whose book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life I take both this last grisly example and its analysis, argues that, contrary to appearances, such developments do not represent a radical break with the tradition. His analysis both builds upon and corrects Michel Foucault's claim that politics in our time is constituted by disciplines of normalization and subjectification that Foucault labels "bio-power." For Foucault, biopower is fundamentally modern. "What might be called a society's 'threshold of modernity,'" he writes, "has been reached when the life of the species is wagered... (shrink)

Rwanda witnessed devastating conflicts leading to genocidal attacks in 1994 with active participation of the police in the pogrom. Various reports implicated the police in high-handedness, torture, extra judicial killings, intimidation, rape, and other heinous crimes during the conflicts. The police force was reformed for optimal performance. This paper examines the impact of the post-conflict reconstruction of the police on internal security management in Rwanda. Findings from the study, which relied on secondary data, are that reform impacted positively (...) on the performance of the police, sharpening its skills in crime detection and prevention and leading to improved security for lives and property in Rwanda. Over-reliance on dwindling external sources and dysfunctional equipment still undermines maximum performance by the police. There should be adequate provision of advanced security devices and better funding of the police for the optimal discharge of their constitutional mandates of securing lives and property in Rwanda. (shrink)

Confronting evils pulls the minds and hearts in several directions. This chapter focuses on acute cataclysmic events that shock people into awareness, or chronic corrosive evils that damage the agency and dull the attention. It also focuses on those who commit grave wrongs, or those who suffer them. Claudia Card's work has offered a steady focus on the experiences and needs of survivors of atrocities and grave wrongs. The chapter explores what Card's most recent work suggests about perpetrators, that is, (...) about the moral risks of participating in evil. Obvious atrocities include terrorism, torture, forced starvation, slavery, rape, and genocide; these each involve many grave wrongs. Card's concepts of social vitality and social death make sense of such cases, enabling us to see a perpetrator's act as a particular destruction of a survivor's world. Social vitality is important for each of us, in all phases of the lives. (shrink)

The concept of evil is one of the most powerful in our moral vocabulary, and is commonly used today in both religious and secular spheres to condemn ideas, people, their actions, and much else besides. Yet appeals to evil in public debate have often deepened existing conflicts, through corruption of rational discourse and demonization of the other. With its religious overtones and implied absolutism, the concept of evil seems ill-suited to advancing public discourse and pro-social relations in a liberal democracy, (...) as evidenced by its use in the abortion debate. International relations have also suffered from references to an ¿axis of evil.¿ Recently, however, philosophers have begun reconceptualising evil within a secular, moral framework, using the idea of evil as the worst kind of immorality to inform and shape our responses to issues like torture, genocide and rape as a weapon of war. This book continues this trend, exploring a constructive role for the concept of evil in practical ethics. Part I of the book begins with two examinations of the concept itself, one focusing primarily on its secular manifestations and the other on evil in its religious context. Individuals are perhaps the primary focus of attributions of evil, and Part II looks at two particular manifestations of evil, in bullying and in mass killing, before considering the nature of evil as an immoral character trait. Part III moves beyond the individual to issues of collective evildoing, evil environments, and political evil. The final part considers responses to evil: can some evil be unforgiveable, and to what extent should we ¿enhance¿ ourselves morally so as to prevent future evildoing? These essays, written by leading philosophers from around the world, including the late Claudia Card, will take the philosophical debate on moral evil in practical ethics to a new level. (shrink)

Some authors think that humanitarian interventions are always morally wrong. Others think that they are sometimes justified. In this paper, I argue that the international community has a moral duty to humanitarian intervention when it comes to mass murder, mass rape, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and deliberate starvation. It is argued that we all have good reasons to endorse an intervention norm protecting basic rights.

Some authors think that humanitarian interventions are always morally wrong. Others think that they are sometimes justified. In this paper, I argue that the international community has a moral duty to humanitarian intervention when it comes to mass murder, mass rape, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and deliberate starvation. It is argued that we all have good reasons to endorse an intervention norm protecting basic rights.

Artikeln tar sin utgångspunkt i två aktuella exempel på krav på historisk rättvisa efter kolonialismen: forna Mau-Mau-kämpars krav på gottgörelse för britternas övergrepp på 1950-talet och hererofolkets krav till Tyskland på gottgörelse för det folkmord som ägde rum 1904–1907. Dessa exempel aktualiserar frågan om historisk rättvisa. Vad innebär historisk rättvisa? Vilka krav på historisk rättvisa är berättigade att ställa? Hur lång tid efter övergrepp och våld finns det skäl att kräva gottgörelse? Kan kraven ärvas till efterkommande generationer? Vem bör gottgöra (...) dem som drabbats? Dessa frågor måste besvaras för att man skall kunna ta ställning till krav på gottgörelse och rättvisa. Syftet med denna artikel är att identifiera och söka besvara en rad frågor som krav på gottgörande rättvisa efter kolonialismen ställer. Avslutningsvis diskuteras kraven från Mau-Mau-kämparna som var internerade i brittiska läger och hererofolkets krav på kompensation från Tyskland.Nyckelord: Gottgörande rättvisa, kompensation, kolonialism, herero, Mau-Mau, global rättvisa, historisk rättvisaEnglish summary: The Meaning of Historical Justice after ColonialismRecently, four Kikuyus and former Kenyan Mau-Mau fighters claimed compensation for castration, torture and rape committed in the British detention camps in the 1950s. Also recently, representatives of the Herero people went to Berlin to bring home skulls that Germans brought to Berlin after the genocide at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The detentions and abuses of Kikuyu and the genocide of the Herero people are just two examples of offenses carried out by European nations during colonialism. Do these offenses have any reverberations today? Should we simply forget about the deeds that happened such a long time ago or do they raise any legal or moral questions?The concept of justice has two dimensions, distributional and rectificatory. This article focuses on the meaning and implication of rectificatory justice for historical wrongs. The simple idea that if A is harming B, A has to correct her act, i.e. the basic idea of rectificatory justice, presupposes a line of complicated assumptions when it is applied to specific historical incidences, for example colonialism.A model provides a basis for an explication of rectificatory justice. It is then applied to a discussion of rectification after colonialism. The questions of who can rightly claim rectification and who owes rectification, if there are temporal limitations to rectification and what rectification after colonialism would imply are discussed. The article ends with an explication of the meaning of rectificatory justice, an argumentation for why rectificatory justice is commendable and an assessment of the demands of the Mau-Mau-fighters and the Herero. (shrink)

We consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e., a criminal court. We attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology (...) of testimony and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for 'knows' ascriptions. (shrink)