Amy Ross

Genocide and GIScience: Integrating Personal Narratives and Geographic Information Science to Study Human Rights

This project combines qualitative data of personal narratives with geographic information science (GIScience) technologies to explore the potential for critical cartography in the study of mass atrocity. The case study used is northern Uganda, where millions have been affected by physical violence and hardship, displacement, and fear. Web-based virtual globes as a ready source of imagery for remote areas and derived spatial data imported to geographic information systems (GIS) provide quantified data that complement testimonials and other qualitative data from the field. Cartographic functions, geovisualization, and spatial analyses available in GIS are used to extract information from high-resolution remote sensing images documenting internally displaced persons (IDP) camps and quantifying evidence of crimes against humanity. These techniques explore spatial relationships and communicate results on the extent and impact of the atrocities in northern Uganda.

Guatemala's Genocide Determination and the Spatial Politics of Justice

This paper focuses on the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarifications (CEH) determination that state violence in Guatemala between 1981 and 1983 constituted acts of genocide. The construction of the CEHs argument is analysed, together with its implications for political dynamics within post-war Guatemala. The potential new ‘geographies of justice’ that flow from the CEHs genocide argument are explored in terms of new venues and avenues for prosecution of Guatemalan genocide cases. It is shown how the CEH made nuanced connections between territory, political practice, ethnic identity and violence, and it is argued that these connections were key to its genocide argument. Finally, the relationship is interrogated between the CEHs genocide determination and the figure of the ‘neutral Maya’ as the post-war representation of an indigenous subject inhabiting a space untainted by the stain of a (failed) revolutionary past.

The Geography of War and Peace: From Death Camps to Diplomats by Colin Flint, ed

The Geography of War and Peace: From Death Camps to Diplomats is a necessary and welcome addition to an evolving area of theoretical inquiry. Whereas books that address war and peace are emerging with frequency in other disciplines, geography has been curiously silent. As editor Colin Flint notes, it has been more than a decade since the appearance of the last volume on the geography of war and peace (see Kliot and Waterman 1991). The lack of attention from geographers is especially troublesome given the potential insights and contributions that scholars trained within a theoretical geographic theoretical framework may offer. Flint’s book responds to this deficiency by addressing war and peace from explicitly geographic themes, and with eminent scholars in the field. Geographic knowledge has historically been used as a tool of war and conquest. As Flint acknowledges in his Introduction, ‘‘Geography (i.e., the mapping of the world out there) has traditionally strong connections to rulers and their attempt to control territories and peoples’’ (p. 5). Geography has always been connected to war, insists Flint, although in complex ways that are often overlooked. His edited volume speaks to the possibilities that politically progressive, theoretically critical geographic knowledge can bring to the study of war and peace. It also takes up the challenge of applying and advancing contemporary geography and the study of war/peace by offering this rich collection of studies. For Flint, the paradigm that guides the volume is the mutually-constituted relationship between geography and war/peace. In particular, he calls attention to the ‘‘fluidity’’ of geography. Military studies and political science, the traditional domains of research on war and peace, have treated geography as ‘‘fixed’’ and/or staticFa mere backdrop to the otherwise dynamic activities of human society. Geography is much more than the stage that hosts the performance of war, insists Flint, who debunks the notion that geography’s relationship to war rests with the ‘‘fixedness’’ or ‘‘permanency’’ of geography. Restricting geography’s role to its ‘‘physicality,’’ argues Flint, provides a limited understanding of geography, one that does not take into consideration the political geographies that shape and are shaped by the many processes of war and peace. . . . war/peace and geography are mutually constituted and socially constructed. In other words, geography and war are the products of human activity; war creates geographies of borders, states, empires and so on, and in turn these geographic entities are the terrain over which peace is maintained or new wars are justified. (pp. 4–5)