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Full-Text Articles in Political Science
Why The U.S. Government Failed To Anticipate The Rwandan Genocide Of 1994: Lessons For Early Warning And Prevention, Matthew Levinger
Why The U.S. Government Failed To Anticipate The Rwandan Genocide Of 1994: Lessons For Early Warning And Prevention, Matthew Levinger
Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal
During the months leading up to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, cognitive biases obstructed the capacity of U.S. government analysts and policymakers to anticipate mass violence against the country’s Tutsi minority. Drawing on recently declassified U.S. government documents and on interviews with key current and former officials, this essay shows that most U.S. government reporting on Rwanda before April 1994 utilized a faulty cognitive frame that failed to differentiate between threats of civil war and genocide. Because U.S. officials framed the crisis in Rwanda as a potential civil war, they underestimated the virulence of the threat to Tutsi civilians and …
The Impossibility To Protect? Media Narratives And The Responsibility To Protect, Kjell Føllingstad Anderson, Ingjerd Veiden Brakstad
The Impossibility To Protect? Media Narratives And The Responsibility To Protect, Kjell Føllingstad Anderson, Ingjerd Veiden Brakstad
Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal
The media plays an important role in communicating mass atrocities to audiences across the globe. This article critically examines how journalists’ framing of mass atrocities may contribute to public discourse on the responsibility to protect principle, in particular the perceived obligation to intervene in cases of mass atrocities. It will draw from a broader conceptual framework on bystander responses to mass atrocities and utilise evidence from the analysis of newspaper accounts of the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides. It will argue that, in some cases, media narratives may actually erode political will and encourage passivity in response to mass atrocities.