Between 1986 and 1994, East Africa's postcolonial, political settlement was profoundly challenged as four revolutionary 'liberation' movements seized power in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda. After years of armed struggle against vicious dictatorships, these movements trans…
Using a diachronic case study approach, this thesis examined the persistence of physical, social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental wounds that are developed during a conflict. The case studies examined the social, economic, political, and environmental conditions…
During the early 1990s a humanitarian intervention for famine in Somalia turned warlike and in influenced the decision by Western nations to not intervene in during the genocide in Rwanda. In the early 2000s the films Black Hawk Down (2001) and Hotel Rwanda (204) were made about…
This work addresses questions about why the United States did not get involved in intervention efforts during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. To answer this, the work will analyze the history of Rwanda leading up to and through the genocide and changes in American policy towards Afri…
This study explores the extent and depth of moral obligations in international relations, and how our collective understanding of these obligations has changed in the post-Cold War era. The genocides in Rwanda (1994) and Srebrenica (1995) raised questions about the moral legitim…
Each year, the international community pumps over 40 billion in humanitarian assistance into the world's most volatile environments. Without proper precautions, these resources can be hijacked by militias and, in some instances, even state militaries, benefiting the powerful at …
Systematic mass rape during conflict has for centuries met with global ignorance and political complacency despite its atrocious character. The conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s altered the silence surrounding this long tolerated, dark underbelly of war. Applying Barry…
Since the end of the Cold War, millions have been killed in a series of genocides. The dismantlement of the Soviet Union left the United States with new decisions to make regarding human rights violations. The United States government no longer had hard interests to intervene in…
This thesis examines the norm of humanitarian intervention and argues that Finnemore and Sikkink's norm life cycle model is an insufficient explanation of the norm, due to its inability to take into account the potential for sham compliance. It demonstrates how three main instru…
Non-governmental humanitarian organizations not only deliver the overwhelming majority of the foreign assistance given by governments to countries in crisis, in many of those countries they also comprise the primary source of information upon which international actors base thei…
Photography has been integral to the conceptualization of human rights. Human rights are envisaged through the experience of regarding photographs, in particular, photographs of atrocity. Photographic mediation is important to the recognition of atrocity because psychoanalysis h…
The development of the international human-rights regime in the second half of the 20th century has led to an increased awareness and rhetorical/normative condemnation of outbreaks of ethnopolitical violence. While concerns of sovereignty and protection of critical interests hav…
This study explores humanitarian intervention, defined briefly as using military force to address human rights violations. It looks at the changing norms of humanitarian intervention after the end of the Cold War. It also examines the arguments for and against humanitarian inter…
This dissertation argues that civilization produces genocides. It begins by considering the obstacles to a sociological understanding of genocide. First among these is the metaphysics of rupture that situates genocide radically outside the field of ordinary social relations, tre…
The viability of the emerging system of international criminal courts requires cooperation from recalcitrant states that harbor defendants charged with human rights violations. Today's international war crimes tribunals are armed with legal authority to demand such cooperation, …
This dissertation uses approaches and concepts from conflict resolution literature to answer two related questions concerning civil war peace agreements. First, it seeks to explain why some peace agreements are signed while others do not get signed, and second, why some agreemen…
This dissertation emerges out of the notion that the United Nations Security Council's Title VII interventions follow a decision making process that weighs not only on denotative and legal interpretations of threat to international peace and security but also on common triggers …
An increase in intra-state, ethnic conflicts has created a need for a renewed analysis of the causes, consequences and solutions to the “new” predominant type of conflict. This dissertation is a contribution to the existing academic efforts to explore the questions of ethnic con…
The Katwe salt industry was a key factor in the pre-colonial centrality of the western lakes region in the regional economy of the Great Lakes region of Central Africa that includes present-day Uganda, Rwanda, eastern Congo, southern Sudan, and northern Tanzania. Western Uganda,…