Nesam McMillan

Regret, Remorse and the Work of Remembrance: Official Responses to the Rwandan Genocide

In 1994, countries and institutions across the world failed to prevent, or stop, the Rwandan genocide. Since then, however, many national and international officials have travelled to Rwanda to express their remorse and regret regarding the international failure to halt the genocide. Their statements of regret constitute the official response to the international failure from the governments and institutions that have been implicated in this occurrence. This article analyses the three most well-known of these political speeches, in order to explore how they come to terms with the international failure. Departing from existing analyses that focus on the apologetic character of these speeches, in this article, I focus on their confessional elements. Understanding these speeches as confessional acts draws attention to their self-interested nature as attempts by these political leaders to configure the international failure as their personal ‘sin’ and then confess its occurrence in order to demonstrate their enlightenment and secure their redemption. In highlighting the self-focused nature of these official responses to the international failure, I demonstrate how they ultimately display the same indifference to the suffering of the Rwandan Tutsis as signified by the international failure itself.

Beyond representation: cultural understandings of the September 11 attacks

Abstract The September 11 attacks changed the world. This article explores this common assertion by analysing selected Australian and American media and political representations of the September 11 attacks. The aim is two-fold: to explore these representations and to analyse their functions and implications. Three themes that characterise Australian and American understandings of September 11 in the immediate aftermath of the attacks will be discussed. The first theme is that the impact of the attacks was represented differently in each country (but in a way that reaffirms the status quo in both nations). Second, the countries shared an interpretation of the attacks that reflects the characteristics of mainstream terrorism discourse. Third, the attacks were also understood in both countries as a challenge to existing structures of representation. It is argued that the September 11 attacks, therefore, expose and violate the limits of representation. By breaking the rules of representation, the September 11 attacks raise the possibility of alternative understandings and appropriate responses to them.

Justice Claims in Colonial Contexts: Commissions of Inquiry in Historical Perspective

Abstract. This paper considers the ways in which commissions of inquiry, as historical antecedents to the contemporary transitional justice mechanism of the truth commission, have been employed by colonial and former colonial powers in the past and present. Engaging with three commissions of inquiry undertaken by colonial and former colonial authorities regarding the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865), Rwandan genocide (1997) and the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve (1881), we demonstrate how commissions of inquiry can function to limit legal and political recognition of the underlying inequality of colonial relations and the need for broader structural reform. Despite this, we indicate the possibilities that remain in the articulation of claims to commissions of inquiry, which can open up spaces for structural injustices to be openly brought to the fore and put on record.

Imagining the International The Constitution of the International As a Site of Crime, Justice and Community

This article highlights and interrogates the significance of dominant representations of international crime and international criminal justice. It positions international criminal justice as a discursive, as well as practical, global project and is concerned, in particular, with the relational and ethical implications of the way in which international crime and justice are thought about, spoken about and portrayed. I argue that dominant representations of international crime and international criminal justice serve to map the international as a site of crime, justice and community. A key contribution of this article is to explicate the uniquely ‘crimino-legal’ nature of this site or sphere, by illustrating its criminological, legal and spatial characteristics. I then reflect on the ethical and relational limits of this arena of sociolegal engagement, as well as emphasising the importance of continued academic attention to the representation and imagination, as well as practice, of international criminal justice.

Racialising global relations: the Rwandan genocide and the ethics of representation

ABSTRACT At a time when the historical experience of the Rwandan genocide continues to be invoked to imagine and affirm international responsibility for the suffering of others, this article examines one way in which this event has been made to mean. Through a critical reading of Hotel Rwanda (a feature film) and Shake Hands with the Devil (a memoir), the article examines how the Rwandan genocide has been framed as an event of ‘white’ Western racism towards ‘black’ African injury. Without disputing the veracity of this explanatory framework, this article interrogates its representational politics and ethics. I problematise its continued use of inherently discriminatory racial categories, demonstrate its Eurocentric nature and call for a mode of understanding the ethical significance of the Rwandan genocide that is not limited to an already existing global relation between suffering ‘black’ bodies and potential ‘white’ saviours. In critiquing these texts and this discursive framework, my aim is to enable ways of coming to terms with the genocide that can accommodate the complex connections that do and may exist between non-Rwandans and the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The ‘Minutes of Evidence’ project: Creating collaborative fields of engagement with the past, present and future

The preceding chapters of this collection demonstrate how nuanced and critically informed analyses of historical evidence can deepen and refine our understanding of nineteenth-century Victorian society. In this chapter, we seek a similar outcome; but we shift the focus towards the task of using historical materials to engage a broader public audience. In doing so we consider the potential benefits of expanding the field of engagement with the past through an innovative collaboration which aims to bring Victoria’s history ‘back to life’ through theatre; by (re)citing its historical archive, and taking the words ‘off the page’ and voicing them out loud, as Wongutha woman and actor Melodie Reynolds-Diarra puts it.

From Sudan to Syria: Locating ‘Regime Change’ in R2P and the ICC *

Recently, R2P and the ICC have been mobilised in different forms to respond to state-directed mass atrocities in Sudan, Libya and Syria. Notably, this has generated debate over the capacity and legitimacy of using R2P and the ICC to facilitate ‘regime change’ in those cases and beyond. This article critically examines where regime change, as an aim and outcome, sits within R2P and ICC doctrine and practice. We demonstrate the ambiguous position of regime change in R2P and ICC doctrine, where it is not explicitly endorsed as an objective but actions that may lead to it are permitted. In practice, R2P and the ICC have been used to starkly different ends in the three cases. Such ambiguity—about what regime change is, and about how far international intervention can legitimately go—and inconsistency in application, can undermine global support for R2P and the ICC as tools for preventing and responding to atrocities.