Wenona Rymond-Richmond

The collective dynamics of racial dehumanization and genocidal victimization in Darfur

Sociologists empirically and theoretically neglect genocide. In this article, our critical collective framing perspective begins by focusing on state origins of race-based ideology in the mobilization and dehumanization leading to genocide. We elaborate this transformative dynamic by identifying racially driven macro-micro-macro-level processes that are theoretically underdeveloped and contested in many settings. We investigate generic processes by exploiting an unprecedented survey of refugees from the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Our focus is on the Sudanese governments crisis framing of a dehumanizing collective process. Sudanese forces joined with Janjaweed militia to attack black African settlements. They aggregated and concentrated racial epithets in a collective process of dehumanization and organized terror, which amplified the severity of genocidal victimization, the lethal and lasting scar of the genocidal state. Our findings question primordial and counter-insurgency explanations, while supporting aspects of the instrumental, population-resource, constructionist, and cognitive perspectives that form the foundation of our critical collective framing perspective. It has been more than 50 years since Sutherland famously added white-collar crime to public sociology, radically reordering discourse about crime. It is time to do the same with Raphael Lemkins concept of genocide.

Racial targeting of sexual violence in Darfur

OBJECTIVES We used the Atrocities Documentation Survey to determine whether Sudanese government forces were involved in racially targeting sexual victimization toward ethnically African women in the Darfur region of western Sudan. METHODS The US State Department conducted the survey by interviewing a randomized multistage probability sample of 1136 Darfur refugees at 20 sites in Chad in 2004. For a subset of 932 respondents who had fled from village clusters that accounted for 15 or more respondents per cluster, we used hierarchical linear models to analyze village-level patterns of reported sexual violence. We statistically controlled for individual sexual victimization to remove bias. RESULTS Respondents reported being subjected to racial epithets associated with sexual victimization significantly more often during combined attacks by Sudanese government forces and Janjaweed militia forces than during separate attacks by either force. CONCLUSIONS Combined attacks by Sudanese government forces and Janjaweed militia forces led to racial epithets being used more often during sexual victimization in Darfur. Our results suggest that the Sudanese government is participating in the use of sexual assault as a racially targeted weapon against ethnically African civilians.

The Mean Streets of the Global Village: Crimes of Exclusion in the United States and Darfur

This paper considers similarities as well as differences in state‐based systems of selective exclusion found in the United States and Sudan. Albeit in different ways and to different degrees, large numbers of homeless adults and children are denied the basic human right to secure shelter in the nations of both the Global North and the Global South. Homelessness and imprisonment are pervasive forms of social exclusion in the late modern Global North, while forced migration and mortality are persistent forms of social exclusion in the contemporary Global South. The domestic policies of exclusion in the North—with their legalized use of arrest, due process, conviction, incarceration and homelessness—are a world apart from the policies of criminal exclusion in the Global South—with their death squads, militias, disappearances and displacements. Yet both depend on repression rather than restoration. Mass incarceration and genocidal death and displacement display an awkward symmetry along the mean streets of the global village, and the fragile and disrupted families of the North parallel the destroyed and displaced families of the South. They are parallel faces of vulnerability. The mean streets of the United States and Sudan are not the same, but their risks and vulnerabilities involve parallel and failed policies of punishment, repression, and exclusion.

American Memories: Atrocities and the Law

of their wealth, though she does, in some strange way (and only in order to sustain the feminist agenda) attribute their affluence to ‘‘the restricted conditions for women’s social mobility’’ (p. 46). Still, despite the organic flaws of this book, some of the authors made a considerable contribution to our understanding of the mentality of certain groups of the population in Russia, like Elena Trubina in her chapter ‘‘Class Differences and Social Mobility among College-Educated Young People.’’ It is not easy for young scholars to find a good balance between loyalty to old methodologies and the willingness to use innovations in sociological literature in their work.

How Sampson's Great American City Challenges Age of Reagan Criminology and Where a Critical Urban Sociology of Crime Might Lead

Robert Sampson’s urban sociology of crime is all about the role of social context in understanding human behavior. It therefore makes sense to begin by placing his work in the context of American criminology. After reviewing the background of Sampson’s scholarship, and the place of Great American City in it, we turn to where his urban sociology of crime can lead: to topics as far afield as genocide in Africa, and as close at hand as the financial crimes of the foreclosure crisis in Chicago. The rise of American criminology in the Age of Roosevelt, from roughly the 1930s to the 1970s, was dominated by classical sociologists such as Cloward and Ohlin who theorized the interconnected legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures of crime in U.S. cities of this era. Sampson entered the field of criminology after this, as the field was changing course during the Age of Reagan. The latter era has arguably lasted from the 1970s on. During this period, sociology has remained important to criminology, but it is now rivaled in influence by fields as different from sociology as operations research, developmental psychology, and economics. What most distinguishes Age of Roosevelt from Age of Reagan criminology is the commitment of the latter to American individualism (Hagan 2012). Robert Sampson and his colleague John Laub (Sampson and Laub 1993; Laub and Sampson 2003) challenged this Age of Reagan criminology in the 1980s and 1990s by reasserting a sociological emphasis on context and by using time and place to leverage this shift. They grounded their challenge in panel data, initially collected by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck at Harvard, tracing adolescents transitioning to adulthood in the neighborhoods of mid-20th century Boston. Sampson and Laub rediscovered the Gluecks’ data in the basement of the Harvard Law Library and extended the panel through adulthood. Many in the sample were World War II veterans and experienced the rapid expansion of Boston’s post-war economy. Sampson and Laub’s contribution was to integrate and subordinate the assumptions of individualistic or developmental criminology within a more encompassing urban sociological framework. They seriously engaged the Age of Reagan emphasis on individual stability in developmental criminology, but they also focused on the malleability of individuals across the life course.

Flip-Flopping on Darfur with Alberto Palloni and Patricia Parker

Its [the low mortality estimate] a deliberate effort by the Bush Administration to downplay the severity of the crisis in order to reduce the urgency of an additional response. I find that to be disingenuous and perhaps murderous. – John Prendergast, International Crisis Group April 26, 2005 The Atrocities Documentation Survey Documenting Atrocities in Darfur is the title of the eight-page report based on a survey of Darfur refugees in Chad and published by the U.S. Department of State in September 2004. The reports chillingly cogent tables, charts, maps, and pictures – derived from interviews with 1,136 refugees in Chad – speak volumes. Our recording from the Atrocities Documentation Survey (ADS) identified more than 12,000 deaths and many more rapes and atrocities that the respondents personally witnessed or heard about before fleeing. The report opens with a chart listing these statistics: 81 percent reported their village was destroyed. 80 percent reported their livestock was stolen. 67 percent reported witnessing or experiencing aerial bombing. 61 percent reported the killing of a family member. 44 percent reported witnessing or experiencing a shooting. 33 percent reported hearing racial epithets during attacks. Secretary of State Colin Powell made headlines when he presented these findings to the UN Security Council and the U.S. Congress as evidence of Sudanese-sponsored genocide in Darfur.

Darfur and the Crime of Genocide: While Criminology Slept with Heather Schoenfeld

Finding the Victims From Vietnam to civil rights and baseball, there is perhaps no more revered chronicler of recent American history than the late David Halberstam. So it is striking that the index of Halberstams exhaustive account, The Fifties , does not contain a single entry for international criminal law, war crimes, Nuremberg, or the Holocaust. Americans in the middle years of the twentieth century simply gave little thought to these issues. Criminologists joined other Americans in moving on with the postwar baby boom and its concerns about the next generations rather than the last generations problems. In the case of criminology, this meant a preoccupation with postwar adolescence and the problems of juvenile delinquency. Edwin Sutherlands student Albert Cohen spoke to these new concerns with his landmark book, Delinquent Boys , and Sheldon Glueck began and ended the decade with research monographs on delinquency. Audiences flocked to see West Side Story and Rebel without a Cause . Americans in the immediate postwar period feared the threats posed by communism and delinquency more than crimes against humanity and genocide. Yet, Sutherland awakened Americans to new problems of white-collar crime. At about the same time, Sutherlands neighbor and colleague at Indiana University in Bloomington, Alfred Kinsey, fascinated Americans with his interviews with samples of college students and adults about their sexual behavior. This work provided an entertaining as well as informative diversion from memories of World War II; it also popularized new social scientific methods of population sampling and survey research.