Browsing by Subject "Darfur"

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    Conditions and courses of genocide
    (2014-06) Brehm, Hollie Nyseth
    After the Nazi Holocaust, the international community vowed to prevent genocide from occurring in the future. Yet, genocide has continued to occur. Accordingly, this study seeks to better understand why and how genocide takes place. I ask two key questions: 1) What are the causes of genocide at societal, state, and international levels? and 2) What accounts for temporal and regional variation in violence within genocides? To assess what leads to genocide, I conduct an event history analysis of the preconditions of genocide in all countries over the last 50 years. This quantitative analysis examines factors associated with the onset of genocide at the societal level (such as ethnolinguistic diversity), state level (such as type of government), and the international level (such as trade), finding that factors at each level must be considered in order to understand why genocides take place and that civil wars are the strongest predictors of genocide. While the event history analysis treats genocide as a single event, viewing genocide as an undifferentiated event misses opportunities to better understand the violence. Thus, the second part of this dissertation draws upon three case studies to analyze regional and temporal variation in genocidal violence in Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Sudan. I rely upon quantitative models to test how numerous factors drawn from genocide studies, the study of political and ethnic violence, and criminology--such as ethnic diversity, resource scarcity, unemployment levels, education levels, or the presence of certain armies--influence the onset and magnitude of certain forms of violence at meso levels. I also conducted fieldwork and 113 interviews with survivors, scholars, and other witnesses. Overall, I find that the factors associated with regional and temporal differences in violence vary based on who the perpetrators are and how they are organized. In Rwanda, members of the community who were not part of previously organized formal groups participated in the violence. As such, criminology's social disorganization theory--which argues that community cohesion influences crime rates--helps explain variation in this violence. In Bosnia-Herzegovina and Darfur, however, previously organized armies and militias generally committed the violence. Accordingly, strategic concerns dictated patterns.
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    Minutes: Senate Committee on Social Concerns: December 11, 2006
    (2006-12-11) University of Minnesota: Senate Committee on Social Concerns
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    Social, Field And Regional Conditions Of Knowledge: News On Darfur In African Media
    (2018-06) Wahutu, Nicholas
    This project is embedded within Max Weber’s 1910 call to study the press while taking his message to a region of the world that is often studied within sociology for what it lacks rather than as one engaging in activities that could be considered on their merit. With few exceptions, sociology has approached sub-Saharan Africa as a space that is paradigmatic of incompleteness and beset by continual setbacks. By and large, sociological scholarship on knowledge production is still constrained by coloniality, which leads to a privileging of western organizations’ construction of knowledge while treating knowledge production by organizations in Africa as ephemeral. The result of this imbalance is that we know more about how the New York Times and Washington Post covered Rwanda and Darfur than how Kenya’s The Daily Nation represented either atrocity. Because sociology has been mostly silent on how countries neighboring Darfur covered the atrocity, there is an implicit message that African fields are not part of the ‘global’ in the same way fields in the global north are. To analyze how African media fields construct knowledge about mass atrocity, this dissertation project is based on a content analysis of every single news article on Darfur from Kenya, South Africa and Rwanda published between 1st of January 2003 and 31st December 2008. Results from this content analysis are used to provide overarching themes of how Darfur was represented in these three countries. Although these data suggest convergence in how Darfur was framed by media fields analyzed here - and those from the global north examined by Joachim Savelsberg- this project’s focus on by-lines to differentiate articles by African journalists from those lifted from wire agencies provides a level of nuance hither missing. While the content analysis offers macro-level evidence for how Darfur was covered, it is sufficient in explaining why and how African media fields employ these frames. To provide this explanation, journalist interviews were conducted in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria from the summer of 2012 to the summer of 2015. These interviews were conducted in Nairobi, Mombasa, Johannesburg, and Lagos. All except three were conducted face to face and the three over the phone. Overall, findings suggest that, although African journalists and scholars are often critical of the use of the ethnic conflict frame as reliant on colonial tropes, arguing that it de-contextualizes and de-politicizes atrocities, they used this frame relatively frequently. Further, although most of the sources quoted were Sudanese state actors, non-Sudanese African sources were marginalized by both wire agencies and African journalists. Sources from the United States and the United Kingdom played a more prominent role in influencing narratives about Darfur in the countries studied here. African media fields are primary narrative constructors of the atrocities in Darfur for African audiences. Being African conspires to produce a condition of invisibility and erasure of African voices in the global narrative construction of knowledge about mass atrocity.