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International Law

Faculty Publications

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Purity

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Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

Sovereignty, Identity, And The Apparatus Of Death, Tawia Baidoe Ansah Jan 2006

Sovereignty, Identity, And The Apparatus Of Death, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

Ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, the government issued broad new laws outlawing the use of ethnic categories, with a view to uniting all Rwandans under a single Rwandan identity. This self-erasure of ethnic identity is deployed primarily within the borders of the state, to enable reconciliation after the genocide in 1994. Outside the borders, the state deploys ethnic identity as one of the rationales for its cross-border wars (in the Democratic Republic of Congo).


Genocide And The Eroticization Of Death: Law, Violence, And Moral Purity, Tawia Baidoe Ansah Jan 2005

Genocide And The Eroticization Of Death: Law, Violence, And Moral Purity, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

In this article, I ask: What is the relationship between law and morality in response to mass violence and suffering abroad? How does law shape and determine our moral response to mass death and suffering? We repose in the law itself a desire to define the moral and the ethical parameters of legal-political action. Thus, when faced with mass violence and suffering abroad, law functions as a proxy for morality. The legal prohibition under the Genocide Convention defines morality, or cabins the variety of moral responses into a single and universally applicable ethical-legal norm of response to genocide. The moral …


A Terrible Purity: International Law, Morality, Religion, Exclusion, Tawia Baidoe Ansah Jan 2005

A Terrible Purity: International Law, Morality, Religion, Exclusion, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

This article's point of departure is the US's war against Iraq, which was begun in 2003 under various rationales - political, legal, and moral. As the legal and political justifications fell away or were cast into question, the moral became the primary reason for going to war. The justifications were, however, construed in religious language. For many, this "return" of religion within US foreign policy seemed particular to the Bush Administration. Others have argued that the turn to religion in time of war is nothing new. Nevertheless, the war and its justifications made me wonder about the nature of public …