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This project examines how Latin American print media discursively construct the issue of femicide/feminicide in the context of rampant judicial impunity, state neglect, neoliberal decimation, and e...

This article traces how food cultures in India reiterate social hierarches and caste logics of cleanliness and purity. Religious, intellectual and aesthetics battles about food preferences underline how the upper caste sensibilities justify and regulate everyday consumption and dietary practices. An integral part of Brahminical power is based on regulating and upholding dietary taboos grounded on caste ideology. Drawing from my ethnographic research on racism, migration, impunity in India over the last two decades, I examine key debates on racism and casteism, and illustrate how the rise of food-based discrimination against migrants from Northeast India is founded on an upper caste practice and logic of contamination, filth, and hygiene. I offer the concept of ganda (dirty) food to highlight how casteism and racism are informed by an upper caste reasoning of superiority, contamination, and privilege in India.

National Reconciliation in Algeria is a controversial subject that provokes considerable debates among human rights organisations as well as opposition parties. Since the third term of Abdelaziz Bo...

When Melie, an enslaved girl, was whipped, raped, and burned, the magistrates of Guadeloupe charged her master, the white Francois Riviere Sommabert, with murder. A central pillar of Sommabert’s de...

Since 2007, tens of thousands of Eritreans escaping widespread repression, open-ended national service, and socio-economic deprivation have reached the Sinai Peninsula hoping to cross the border into Israel. Early on, voluntary smuggling facilitated refugee crossings. Around 2009, however, smuggling became a notorious trafficking network, referred to as Sinai trafficking. Hostages were raped, tortured, and murdered. This human tragedy continued for several years, unknown to the outside world, and was, strikingly, not acted upon, even once discovered. No criminal investigation was taken after its discovery. How and why do the torture, death, and reports of organ trading of thousands of innocent refugees go ignored? In this article, I look into why it might be that the Sinai trafficking has gone unpunished, concluding that it is because the victims, had, due to their circumstances, come to be regarded merely as “bare lives”.

In Thailand, how have human rights abuses become institutionalized in public view? Who can kill and be killed with impunity? This book addresses these questions. The author, an anthropologist, is a...

This article offers an analysis of the role that photography plays in the history and memory of the two political events in Thailand known as 14 October 1973 and 6 October 1976. Both events were violent and took place in public, in front of the press and cameras. The events were connected, but the records of them have been treated very differently. This difference is particularly clear in the representation of violence. Photographs contribute to the dominant narrative of 14 October as a struggle for democracy and justice, albeit within a nationalist discourse that obscures and abstracts state violence. After two initial decades of invisibility and silence, photographs from 6 October have become a repository in a human rights discourse that focuses on individual redress for violence and impunity. To understand the role of photography in history, attention must be given to the conditions for archiving and dissemination, as well as to lacunae in the photographic records–to what is missing. Furthermore, thinking beyond the photographic frame and of photography as an event over time and space can direct attention towards the power relations that dictate the photographed event, as well as the moments of encounter with the photographs. (Less)

Colombian journalists experience abundant threats and acts of violence as well as corporate and governmental obstacles to publishing the truth. In response, many reporters engage in self-censorship...

Since 2008 the United Nations Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism has regularly reviewed every state’s human rights record. Any civil society organisation can submit a report to the review, t...

The ICC and R2P share the goal of ending atrocity crimes. Nonetheless, they operate quite differently. Recently, there has been increasing support for bringing the ICC within the R2P toolkits, hopi...

Pakistan’s journalists confront severe safety risks across the country and impunity to crimes against them allows the perpetrators to go unpunished. Now the country is recognized as one of the dead...

Since its emergence the African Union has continued to develop its normative framework, overcoming a culture of impunity and non-intervention and promoting innovative concepts such as the responsib...

This article explores how electoral manipulation intersects with issues of impunity in a constituency in Western Uttar Pradesh, North India. By casting electoral manipulation as a tool to obtain, m...

Governed by the Rome Statute, the International Criminal Court (ICC) marks the first attempt by the international community to end impunity for war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggres...

In 1740, Commodore George Anson’s expedition to the Pacific once more demonstrated the chronic fragility of Spanish defenses in the entire region. The success and impunity enjoyed by the British pr...

The prevalence and persistence of impunity for human rights violations in the war on terror have attracted significant interest from scholars and practitioners. Insufficient attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which impunity might be shaping key objectives and practices of the war on terror and enabling or constraining their pursuit in war zones. Drawing on insights from security cultures theory and analysis of empirical evidence from Afghanistan, this article demonstrates how impunity serves as a mechanism for reproduction and diffusion of the security culture of the war on terror and for cooption and subversion of central components of another security culture: the liberal peace. The argument is elaborated by investigating the functions of impunity in generating the kind of politics that justify an endless war and facilitate the pursuit of its shifting goals and methods. The article suggests that the role of impunity in shaping global security pathways might be more significant than previously understood and highlights the potential of security cultures theory to help explain human rights outcomes in counterterrorism and peace operations.

Warning: This piece contains graphic descriptions of sexual and reproductive violence against women.On the morning of March 21, 2019, a group of women congregated outside the regional district atto...

This case note uses the recent Supreme Court decision of Romila Thapar v. Union of India to highlight how the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act slowly erodes fundamental rights. It argues that R...

On July 19th, 2005, American Army Private First Class LaVena Johnson died in Balad, Iraq, just 8 days shy of her 20th birthday. On July 13th, 2015, almost 10 years later, 28-year-old Sandra...

When Honduran soldiers stormed the presidential residence in Tegucigalpa and kidnapped then-President Manuel Zelaya in a matter of minutes to fly him into exile on June 28, 2009, Tirza del Carmen F...

Settling past human rights abuses is an ongoing process in Indonesia. In addition to the existing human rights court system, the government has recently put forward new proposals for reconc...

Political will is commonly recognised as being fundamental to policy-making processes surrounding accountability for serious human rights abuses in transitional justice contexts. In practice, howev...

Continuous trauma syndrome (CTS) is the foundation for the characters in the film Impunity. The aesthetic choices in the narrative structure are an exploration of the discursive nature of v...

Contemporary processes of regionalisation of fundamental human rights protection beg the question: are we looking up? Or are we looking out? This paper argues, via the case study of the revolutiona...

In Colombia’s transition between conflict and peace the ‘disappeared’ have emerged as a potent symbol of the history of impunity and exclusion and their exhumation a sign of progress towards peace and reconciliation. As elsewhere in Latin America the families of the disappeared have been at the core of a ‘human rights forensics’ seeking to exhume the disappeared as victims of political violence and to hold perpetrators accountable. However, in Colombia the state’s attitude towards human rights is ambiguous. It has introduced transitional justice laws building upon strong Colombian constitutional traditions to project a strong human rights commitment. In doing so it has manipulated Colombians’ faith in ‘magical legalism’, the belief in the transformative capacity of law as an alternative to the chronic failure of democratic politics. However, the state has turned human rights accountability into an enormous legal bureaucratic registration exercise. They have de-politicized the ‘disappeared’ through...

Law printing changed dramatically in the reign of Charles I. This article shows that the legally imposed monopoly on printing books of the common law (the law patent) was breached regularly and seemingly with impunity. Piracy, false attributions of authorship and concerns about quality all appear from the late-1620s onwards. By identifying these developments, the article raises questions about the reliability of the printed texts of the early-modern common law. The article also explains these changes by stressing changes related to the holder of the patent and those printing under it.

In summer 2004, an UN-sponsored international rule of law commission based on an initiative of the Guatemalan human rights community was rejected by Guatemalan political elites. In 2007, a new version, the International Commission against Impunity (CICIG), was approved by the Guatemalan Congress and has since been active in the country, supporting the modernisation of the Guatemalan judicial system and the investigation and prosecution of criminal networks. The CICIG has been hailed as part of a new generation of rule of law promotion that addresses the problems of post-conflict states. How did this change in elite support come about? Neither increased pressure from the international community nor changes in the elite groups in power can fully explain this shift. Rather, Guatemalan elites actively reshaped the commission; in addition, the human rights community reframed it to better fit the risk perceptions of the general public.

This article examines the historically grounded social acceptance of impunity and the role of unwanted actors in peace and transitional processes. The article argues from a post-demobilization viol...

This article discusses the underpinnings of impunity and justice in Cambodia as the former Khmer Rouge leaders face trial in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The extent ...

Transitional Justice in Latin America: The Uneven Road from Impunity Towards Accountability, edited by Elin Skaar, Jemima Garcia-Godos and Cath Collins, explores the diverse paths Latin American co...

Any attempt to stop cycles of violence requires an understanding of the cultural meanings of impunity, or freedom from consequences. As Cambodia struggles to combat the tide of violence in daily li...

The Nigerian army has long had a poor human rights record. From the times of the Biafra War (1967–1970) to massacres of Boko Haram members in 2009 and clashes with the Shiite minority in 2015, soldiers and officers have perpetrated widespread and serious violations. Corruption, impunity, a weak chain of command and lack of accountability, qualifications, training, recruitment, supplies, and control by civilian authorities explain their wrongdoings, together with the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and the war on terror since 2009. Such problems are still prevalent as Nigeria heads for general elections in 2019. This article thus shows that lessons were not learned despite the democratization process since the end of military rule in 1999.

A new, French-led partnership to hold perpetrators of chemical-weapons attacks to account arrives not a moment too soon.

This paper looks at the shifting manner in which paramilitarism has been reproduced in Haiti, examining how it has evolved from the Cold War into the era of capitalist globalisation. The central argument of this article is that paramilitarism has not disappeared but has been altered, and that this has occurred in part due to the changing strategies of elites in the global era. Rather than a permanent and widespread force, paramilitary groups are utilised in smaller numbers and only in certain ‘emergency periods’, serving a purpose of containment: targeting political threats and beating down those large populations whose social reproduction is not required by transnational capital. This has been a difficult situation for elites to manage, as they often have only limited control over such ruthless, corrupt and violent elements, which they sometimes require. Following the 1991 and 2004 coup d’etats in Haiti, a military–paramilitary–bourgeoisie grouping has repeatedly worked to recover its impunity an...

This article engages the historical approach to the ‘hidden Atlantic’ (Michael Zeuske) in a complementary, literature-based analysis. It argues that the diverse facets of the ‘hidden’ require diverse methodological approaches; firstly, because the ‘hidden’ has several dimensions, and secondly, because the ethical impetus of the cultural analyst or the historian requires a choosing of sides. Authors of works labelled as ‘literary’ or ‘fiction’, which are nevertheless known to have a close relationship to real-life experience, negotiate this fine line. The article analyses in greater detail two such works – B. Traven’s Das Totenschiff (1926) and Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman (1997) – with reference to their treatment of the ‘Totenschiff’ and its crews in the context of predatory capitalism. In the first instance, the article explores two dimensions of the ‘hidden’: the ‘forcibly rendered absent’ (Boaventura de Sousa Santos) and the ‘opaque’ (Edouard Glissant). The literary figure of the ‘Totenschiff’, the ‘ship of the dead’, is deployed by the authors to bring to the attention of the readers the plight of the crew members who have been expulsed (Saskia Sassen) from society, the callousness and impunity of the perpetuators and agents of predatory capitalism who exploit them, and the complicity of the ‘civilized’ populations who acquiesce to this expulsion. While they do this, the authors use ‘literariness’ to preserve the opacity which protects the expulsed. Through a comparative analysis of the interplay of absences and opacities in both novels, with a particular focus on deviant and hegemonic masculinities, this article explores possibilities for cultural analysts to engage with the ‘hidden’, without jeopardizing the relative safety granted to the expulsed by opacity.

This article explores how transnational borderlands matter for conflict prevention and, in particular, so-called upstream engagement, which aims to reduce threats to global stability and security that arise from the world’s increasing interconnectedness. Accounting for transnational borderlands in vulnerable regions is crucial for conflict prevention as pursued by the defence and security sector because borderlands are catalysts of the negative side of global interconnectedness: they are business hubs for transnational organised crime, sites of retreat for conflict actors, and safe havens for terrorists. The border areas’ proneness to impunity and the ability of violent non-state actors to govern these spaces illicitly contribute to the emergence of these characteristics. I therefore argue that upstream conflict prevention needs to do two things to address these risks: first, to overcome a national security approach centred on the borderline and instead acknowledge transnational security dynamics in borderlands on both sides of the border; second, to overcome the state-centred governance lens to also consider governance exerted by non-state actors. The article draws on empirical data from a six-year study including over a year of fieldwork in and on Colombia’s borderlands.

At the heart of intractable conflict lies a challenging paradox: impunity is both a cause of intractability and, operationalized through the granting of amnesties, one of the key tools employed by ...

This article examines the impact of a new sustained focus in Indonesian human rights activism on connecting historical experiences of violence to ongoing impunity, in order to assess what forms of memory activism are effective in breaking a justice impasse. It does so by using the much more successful case of Argentinian human rights activism for justice for the 1976–83 repression as a point of comparison. Soon after the end of authoritarian rule, Argentinians held a truth commission and trials of key military leaders. Then, following a period of stalled justice, activists were able to create a new societal consensus on the need for further redress including extended trials. In Indonesia, meanwhile, a proposed truth commission was abandoned and there have been no trials of military leaders, and no other forms of redress initiated by the government for this case. Despite the limitations of almost all justice measures in fully addressing past human rights crimes, the lack of use of any measures acce...

Reparative measures for conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) attend to the practical needs of victims while also addressing the long-term structural conditions that led to the violence and often endure after conflict. Over the last decade, transitional justice has sought to address high levels of impunity for SGBV, while also addressing the long-term structural conditions causing and exacerbating it. In this article we study the case of Sri Lanka, where crimes have been committed during and after the civil war (1983–2009) but a transitional justice mechanism to redress them is unlikely to be established. The article considers whether in such a situation of impunity gender-sensitive approaches to SGBV prevention can still be promoted to ensure its non-recurrence. We closely examine post-conflict Sri Lanka and women’s ongoing experiences of multiple forms of insecurity and violence to highlight the relationship between enduring structural gender inequalities and reparative justic...

En esta introducción, los editores presentan los siete artículos que hacen parte de este número especial sobre Colombia. Los editores explican el contexto de la guerra que ha devastado este país durante más de 50 años y subrayan temas comunes que conectan los artículos. El ensayo también analiza cómo el acuerdo de paz logrado en 2016 busca reconocer las causas del conflicto con el fin de establecer una paz duradera con justicia. El ensayo también examina los desafíos que supone la implementación del acuerdo. Conflictos de desigualdad rural, desplazamiento, impunidad, la economía de las drogas, el aspecto militar, los grupos armados privados, nuevas demandas sociales, innovadores proyectos de memoria y el cambiante rol del estado son todos temas discutidos en este texto. La bibliografía proporciona una guía a la mejor literatura colombiana sobre el conflicto armado, sus impactos y los posibles resultados del acuerdo de paz. In this introduction, the editors present the seven articles that constitute this special issue on Colombia. They explain the context of the war that has wracked the country for more than 50 years and highlight the central themes that connect the articles. This essay also analyzes how the 2016 accord between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) aims to address the causes of the conflict so as to establish a durable peace with justice. The essay then looks at the challenges ahead for the implementation of the agreement. Issues of rural inequality, displacement, impunity, the illegal drug economy, the military, private armed groups, new social demands, innovative memory projects, and the changing role of the state are discussed. The bibliography provides a guide to some of the best Colombian literature on the armed conflict, its impact, and possible outcomes of the peace process.

Reparations at the International Criminal Court (ICC) raise victims’ expectations that they would have an avenue of redress in the face of domestic impunity. This article examines the purpose of reparations at the ICC, which notably move away from the international law state-centric modes of liability for reparations to more private law individual liability and even developmental or subsidiary responsibility when provided by the Trust Fund for Victims. At the crux of the debate on reparations at the ICC rests the challenge between delivering justice to victims of international crimes against the limited capacity and jurisdiction of the Court. To overcome these limitations and to better realise expectations of reparations at the ICC, this article explores the promise of transformative reparations in trying to widen the benefits of reparations beyond those victims who suffer crimes by a convicted person, as well as tackling the causes of such crimes. Likewise this article will posit the role of complementarity and state responsibility in filling the gap between expectations and possibilities of reparations. In concluding it will also examine future prospects and challenges of a separate reparations chamber.

The aim of this article is to explore and critique recent aspirations to bridge the traditional divide between subjective and objective accounts of wellbeing through a psychological concordance thesis, according to which flourishing and happiness will, for psychological reasons, go hand in hand. Two varieties of the concordance thesis are explored, one psychological in origin and the other philosophical, with a special focus on the latter (derived from Aristotle) as it makes more radical psychological claims. Counterexamples are provided and discussed of unhappy and not-happy-enough flourishers, and of happy and not-unhappy-enough non-flourishers. The implications of those counterexamples are elicited, with the conclusion being that normative claims about the relative priority of flourishing over happiness (or vice versa) for wellbeing cannot be avoided with impunity. The concordance thesis does not seem to bear scrutiny, at least not as a thesis about ‘psychological necessity’; however, this leav...

Ranked by GDP, Nicaragua is the most impoverished country in Central America. Yet in a region beset by violent crime, police corruption, and impunity, Nicaragua is comparatively safe and secure. It...

The resource debate is easily discerned as part of the ongoing history of farmer–herdsman conflict in the North Central region of Nigeria. Scarcity theorists are adept at linking scarcity with the onset of livelihood conflict while on the other hand resource abundance pundits insist it is profusion and not scarcity that impels conflict. This article traverses these wrangles and proceeds to downplay the resource polemic altogether. It is proposed that the resource debate, despite its profoundness, presents a narrow reading of farmer–herdsman clashes in Nigeria’s North Central region. It is suggested that a number of other factors, including elite land grabbing, ethno-religious identity construction, weak state capabilities, the citizenship question, corrupt traditional institutions, the lack of an effective land tenure system and a widespread culture of impunity, make for better readings of the conflict. Owing to the negative impacts of the conflict on state and society, it is recommended that the ...

In this article, it is claimed that Turkey’s problematic situation before the ECHR is generally rooted in two main reasons: the problem of effectiveness and the problem of pluralism in the Turkish ...

Silence may play different roles during post-authoritarian and transitional periods: in Spain, it has been a key element for impunity. Silence was twice imposed to victims: first, after the end of the civil war and during dictatorship, silence was a survival strategy to Franco’s repressive machinery; later, during the democratic transition, silence was said to be the price to pay for reconciliation and democracy. While the victims on Franco’s side had reparation, Franco’s victims did not –in fact thousands of them still remain buried in unmarked mass graves. Any attempts to pursue justice through the Spanish judiciary have been unsuccessful, including the resort to the ECtHR. This paper analyses the ways in which silence was imposed and the instrumental role the repression and its normative regime had on it, and in turn the impact of silence on justice. In this context, the role of silence goes beyond impacting the individual trauma and shaping a national memory but also makes victims unwillingly give up their right to justice. This article contends that, when imposed (explicit or implicitly) silence results in impunity and courts should take this into consideration when determining victims’ effective capacity to claim their rights in judicial fora.

In March 2016, the United Nations Security Council adopted its first resolution devoted entirely to the prevention of peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) in peace operations. This artic...

As gold prices soared from 2008 onwards, tens of thousands of foreign miners, especially from China, entered the small-scale mining sector in Ghana, despite it being ‘reserved for Ghanaian citizens’ by law. A free-for-all ensued in which Ghanaian and Chinese miners engaged in both contestation and collaboration over access to gold, a situation described as ‘out of control’ and a ‘culture of impunity’. Where was the state? This paper addresses the question of how and why pervasive and illicit foreign involvement occurred without earlier state intervention. Findings indicate that the state was not absent. Foreign miners operated with impunity precisely because they were protected by those in authority, that is, public officials, politicians and chiefs, in return for private payments. Explaining why state institutions failed in their responsibilities leads to reflection about the contemporary state in Ghana. It is concluded that the informality and corruption characteristic of neopatrimonialism remai...

Many African countries gained political independence in the 1960s. This era of independence came with promises and great expectations of economic, political and social development. Fifty years later, it is certain that the promises and expectations of independence have not been easily realised. Perennial violent conflicts have continued to ravage many countries in Africa, causing the catastrophic breakdown of law and order. Therefore, one of the major issues in conflict resolution discourse in Africa is how to develop functional mechanisms for the prevention of violent conflicts. This article examines the capacity of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to act as a mechanism for conflict prevention in Africa. Notwithstanding the doubts and uncertainties associated with the impact of law on conflict transformation, this article argues in the main that the ICC contributes to conflict prevention in Africa by expressing global norms of international law, challenging the culture of impunity in some c...