Richard Ashby Wilson

Judging History: The Historical Record of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

Scholars and legal officials have argued that courts should not attempt to write definitive historical accounts of mass human rights violations. Even if a court seeks to reconstruct a comprehensive history of a conflict, law and history use such different modes of thinking and inquiry that legal accounts are likely to be partial, deeply flawed, or just plain boring. These criticisms have appeared prominently in discussions of Holocaust trials in the domestic courts of Israel and France. Yet the Tadić and Krstić judgments written by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) are characterized by detailed contextualization of criminal acts and extensive historical interpretation. This Article asserts that the Tribunals historical record represents a departure from previous courtroom accounts of mass atrocities for two reasons. First, because it is an international tribunal it has been less influenced by distorted narratives on national identity. Second, the ICTY has applied legal categories such as genocide which emphasize the collective nature of crimes against humanity, and this compels the court to situate individual acts within long-term, systematic policies.

Human Rights in the ‘War on Terror’

Introduction Richard Ashby Wilson 1. Order, rights, and threats: terrorism and global justice Michael Freeman 2. Liberal security Fernando Teson 3. The human rights case for the war in Iraq: a consequentialist view Thomas Cushman 4. Human rights as an ethics of power John Wallach 5. How not to promote democracy and human rights Aryeh Neier 6. War in Iraq: not a humanitarian intervention Kenneth Roth 7. The tension between combating terrorism and protecting civil liberties Richard Goldstone 8. Fair trials for terrorists? Geoffrey Robertson 9. Nationalizing the lcoal: comparative notes on the recent restructuring of political space Carol J. Greenhouse 10. The impact of counter terror on the promotion and protection of human rights: a global perspective Neil Hicks 11. Human rights: a descending spiral Richard Falk 12. Eight fallacies about liberty and security David Luban 13. Our privacy, ourselves in the age of technological intrusions Peter Galison and Martha Minow 14. Are human rights universal in the age of terrorism? Wiktor Osiatynski 15. Connecting human rights, human development and human security Mary Robinson 16. Human rights and civil society in a new age of American exceptionalism Julie Mertus.

War and Ethnicity: Global Connections and Local Violence

Introduction - war and ethnicity, David Turton my neighbour, my enemy - the manipulation of ethnic identity and the origins and conduct of war in Yugoslavia, Tom Gallagher an ethnic war that did not take place - Macedonia, its minorities and its neighbours in the 1990s, Stefan Troebst Oromo national liberation, ethnicity and politics mythomoteurs in the Horn of Africa, Thomas Zitelman war in the post-World War II world - some empirical trends and a theoretical approach, Klaus Juergen Gantzel nationalism and ethnicity - ethnic nationalism and the regulation of ethnic conflict, Jakob Rosel ethnic mobilization, war and multi-culturalism, Harry Goulbourne clan conflict and ethnicity in Somalia - humanitarian intervention in a stateless society, Iaon Lewis ethnic war and international humanitarian intervention, Mark Duffield postscript - current issues and future directions in the study of ethnicity, ethnic conflict and humanitarian intervention, Giorgio Ausenda.

The Role of the Church in Providing Services for the Aging

We examined the responsiveness of churches and synagogues to the aging of their members. Employing a sample of 212 churches and synagogues, we described the availability of church-based aging programs, factors related to their development, linkages between churches and community agencies, and the clergys perception of unmet needs among older persons. Overall, churches that offered more church-based aging programs were those that envisioned their role as encompassing the social needs of members. The percentage of older persons in the congregation was unrelated to the number of programs for the aging. We discuss the implications for education and program planning.

Reconciliation and Revenge in Post‐Apartheid South Africa

Human rights are a central element in the new governmental project in the new South Africa, and this article traces some of the specific forms of connection and disconnection between notions of justice found in townships of the Vaal and rights discourses as articulated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The introduction of human rights in post‐apartheid South Africa has had varied social effects. Religious values and human rights discourse have converged on the notion of reconciliation on the basis of shared value orientations and institutional structures. There are clear divergences, however, between human rights ideas and the notions of justice expressed in local lekgotla, or township courts, which emphasize punishment and retribution. The article concludes that the plurality of legal orders in South Africa results not from systemic relations between law and society but from multiple forms of social action seeking to alter the direction of social change in the area of justice within the context of the nation‐building project of the post‐apartheid state.

Children and War in Sierra Leone: A West African Diary

In June 2001, Richard Wilson participated in a technical meeting on childrens participation and protection in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone, organized by UNICEF and the Human Rights Forum of Sierra Leone. The Report ‘Children and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone’, will be delivered in late 2001 to the UN Security Council. This is his diary of the drafting process.

In Conversation with Sindre Bangstad and Knut G. Nustad About Anthropology, Hate Speech and Incitement to Commit Genocide. House of Literature, May 14, 2013

This Chapter sees a conversation between Prof. Richard Ashby Wilson (University of Connecticut) and Sindre Bangstad and Associate Professor Knut G. Nustad (University of Oslo) about anthropology, hate speech and incitement to commit genocide . Wilson, a central scholar in the anthropology of law and human rights in recent decades, tells the story of how he first came to take an interest in this field of study while undertaking fieldwork in a Mayan Indian community in Guatemala in the late 1980s. Wilson also discusses his work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in post-apartheid South Africa , and his more recent work on how international criminal courts established in the wake of war in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda have dealt with hate speech and incitement to genocide.

How to accept German reparations

SUNY Press, 2003). 13. CLR James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (New York: PM Press, 2012), 131. 14. Andrea Smith, ‘Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing’, in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Boston, MA: South End Press, 2006). 15. See Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (1998), 1–2. Lorenzo Veracini, for his part, helpfully includes African settler colonies in his theoretical overview of this specific form of domination, and even points toward a provocative contextualization of the engineered failures of African decolonization in the context of settler colonialism on that continent in Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 106–7. 16. Alongside Fanon, one could point to the aforementioned James, Nyerere, Ali A. Mazrui, and perhaps most centrally, Ngugi Wa-Thiongo. The latter’s first novel, Weep Not, Child, for instance, is a rich reflection on some of the central psychoaffective, territorial, cultural, and political predicaments into which Indigenous populations are forced by settler colonial structures of governance. Wa-Thiongo’s influence on contemporary theories of Indigenous resurgence and struggle against settler colonial governance can be observed in such classic works in Native studies as Linda Tuhiwai-Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, for instance. See Ngugi Wa-Thiongo, Weep Not, Child (New York: Penguin Classics, 2012); Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012). 17. On the imperative to reciprocate studies and politics for Africa when conducting studies of the politics in and of Africa, see Olufemi Taiwomignolo, ‘What is African Studies?’, Reclaiming the Human Sciences through African Perspectives Volume II, eds. Helen Lauer and Kofi Anyidoho (Accra, Ghana: Sub Saharan, 2012). 18. Siba N. Grovogui, ‘Regimes of Sovereignty: Rethinking International Morality and the African Condition’, The European Journal of International Relations 8 (2002); Achille Mbembe, ‘At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa’, Public Culture 12 (2000). 19. See Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Siba N. Grovogui, ‘Deferring Difference’, in Postcolonial Theory and International Relations, ed. Sanjay Seth (London: Routledge, 2012), 106–23; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2003). 20. See, for example, John Borneman, ‘American Anthropology as Foreign Policy’, American Anthropologist 97 (1995); Marc Pinkoski, ‘Back to Boas’, Histories of Anthropology Annual 7 (2011): 127–69; George Stocking, ‘Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective’, American Anthropologist 68 (1966): 867–82; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (1998). 21. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 1–2. 22. Ibid., 18–19. 23. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 57–93. 24. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 2004); Frantz Fanon, ‘Medicine and Colonialism’, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove, 1965), 121–45. 25. Pinkoski, ‘Back to Boas’.

Human Rights and Nation-Building

The quest to build a ‘culture of human rights’ in South Africa after the multi-racial elections of 1994 needs to be understood in the context of a sea-change in global politics, and the rise of human rights as the archetypal language of democratic transition. A revived language of liberal democracy became increasingly prevalent in the mid-1980s, and was accentuated by the demise of the former Soviet Bloc and the rise of ethno-nationalist conflict in the Balkans. Since 1990, nearly all transitions from authoritarian rule have adopted the language of human rights and the political model of constitutionalism,1 especially in Latin America and the new states of Eastern Europe.2 The end of the Cold War and the threat of irredentist nationalism led many intellectuals in Europe from a variety of political traditions to promote human rights and a return to the Enlightenment project. Among them, those as recondite as Jürgen Habermas (1992), as erudite as Julia Kristeva (1993) and as media-friendly as Michael Ignatieff (1993) advocated the establishment of constitutionalist states based upon the rule of law. All converge on the view that nations must not be constituted on the basis of race, ethnicity, language or religion, but should be founded instead on a ‘community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values’ (Ignatieff 1993:3–4). In this formulation, human rights are portrayed as the antithesis of nationalist modes of nationbuilding. Habermas made one of the most influential constitutionalist statements of the 1990s in his paper ‘Citizenship and National Identity’ (1992). Here, he sees political change in Eastern Europe as having restored an older Enlightenment political tradition and recaptured the language of rights. Rights must do a great deal in Habermas’ formulations: they underwrite an Aristotelian conception of participatory citizenship; they create a barrier to the totalitarian pretensions of states; and they resolve the awkward relationship between citizenship and nationalism: