Browsing by Subject "Rwanda"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    The Battle Between Human Rights and Development in Post-Conflict Situations: Assessed Through the Lens of the Rwandan Model
    (2020-05-01) Olubayo, Paul
    The principles of human rights and development share both a common vision and a common purpose; the desire “to secure, for every human being, freedom, well-being and dignity”. These basic, underlying principles have been promoted and advocated in various differing forms throughout human history, with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) noting that concern for these two principles can be dated as far back as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. Further, throughout history we have seen endeavors to link these two agendas in a mutually beneficial relationship. It has been stated that one of the central achievements of the first World Conference on Human Rights in 1968, was its assertion that ‘the achievement of lasting progress in the implementation of human rights is dependent upon sound and effective national and international policies of economic and social development.’ The international community would take this a step further in 1977 when the United Nations Commission on Human Rights proclaimed the existence of a human right to development, which would later be adopted formally by the UN General Assembly in 1986.
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    The burden of privilege: navigating transnational space and migration dilemmas among Rwandan scholarship students in the U.S.
    (2014-08) Baxter, Aryn Raye
    This dissertation is an ethnography of the transnational education space inhabited by higher education scholarship recipients from Rwanda pursuing undergraduate degrees in the United States. It examines how this space is produced through the representational practices of actors in the U.S. and Rwanda and, in turn, constitutes the relationships, dilemmas, transformations, and representations that occur within these spaces. Employing a transnational lens, the study describes a space of opportunity as well as tension between contrasting narratives of change, national and familial priorities, and the "magical" expectations of various actors that contrast with students' lived experiences of undergraduate education in the U.S. Most centrally, it argues that navigating the diverse expectations associated with a U.S. education is a significant yet under-addressed challenge faced by scholarship students from low-income and post-conflict contexts. Understanding this burden--the burden of privilege--is its primary focus.The study demonstrates that spatial analysis offers a promising approach for illuminating the experiences of internationally mobile students and for informing the design and implementation of international higher education scholarship programs. It concludes that scholarship students would benefit from program designs that create space for open dialogue about the migration dilemmas that accompany international mobility, particularly those related to the weighty expectations of family and nation for those privileged to have received scholarships to study in the U.S. This is particularly crucial for programs involving youth from low-income and post-conflict contexts--a group for whom the burden of such a privilege is particularly pronounced.
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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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    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.
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    Warming and stratification changes in Lake Kivu, East Africa
    (2013-08) Aaberg, Arthur Allen
    To investigate changes in the temperature and stratification structure in Lake Kivu, we have installed a string of temperature recorders and performed CTD casts. The obtained data have been compared to historical profiles and the heat budget for the lake was analyzed. Lake Kivu is a meromictic lake characterized by an anomalous temperature distribution with a temperature minimum close to the base of the seasonally mixed layer. Warming rate at the depth of the temperature inversion is consistent with the historical warming rate of the surface layer of ∼0.14 ±0.02 °C per decade. Atmospheric warming rates since the 1970's in East Africa are between 0.20 and 0.25 °C per decade. Reported warming in surface waters of other East-African rift lakes is ∼0.13 °C per decade. Deep waters (greater than 350 m) in Lake Kivu exhibit variability in temperature and are currently warming at a rate of &sim0.06±0.02 °C per decade based on the increase in heat content since the 1970's and the increase in temperature seen in the deepest measurements between our 2011 and 2012 profiles. The monimolimnion of Lake Kivu cannot be considered to be in a steady state. The depth of wind-induced surface mixing during the dry season varies significantly between years. Mixing to 80 m (the present depth of the temperature inversion) requires continuous winds blowing from the south at 9–10 m s-1, whereas typical wind speed maxima are around 5–6 m s-1 and capable of mixing to around 65 m depth. Occasional stronger winds cause episodic mixing closer to the inversion which removes heat, but this does not happen on a regular basis. As the temperature inversion in recent historical profiles has been as shallow as 65 m, mixing to the temperature inversion depth is possible during years with stronger than average winds. With heat diffusing towards the temperature inversion from both above and below, the temperature at the inversion depth will continue to rise, resulting in a reduced transport of heat out of the deep waters that may increase the rate at which the water column is warming.
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    Worldly encounters : the politics of global governance and Women’s Human Rights in East Africa.
    (2009-07) Koomen, Johanna Engelina
    Global governance and international women's human rights campaigns are always translated and negotiated locally. This dissertation examines the complex politics of international women's human rights campaigns in East Africa by focusing on the social practices that characterize these projects. I investigate three campaigns to promote women's human rights and empowerment. First, I examine efforts to promote legal redress for Rwandan victims of sexual violence during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Second, I study projects seeking to eliminate "harmful traditional practices" such as female genital cutting in East Africa. I focus on initiatives in pastoralist villages in northern Tanzania, as well as efforts in Kenya and Uganda. Third, I turn my attention to emerging campaigns to promote African women's "empowerment" and entrepreneurialism through microcredit and microfinance. By exploring the socially-situated practices of international women's human rights campaigns - their translations and negotiations - this project seeks to illustrate how the boundaries and identities of global governance are unstably reconfigured and reproduced.