Human Rights? What a Good Idea! From Universal Jurisdiction to Crime Prevention

Abstract

Over the last decades, Genocide Studies has entered in a “comfort zone.” With fellowships and support from governments or NGOs, we have developed a very comfortable environment in which the knowledge we produce about genocide prevention is neither critical nor useful. We have become trapped by assumptions we have never checked against reality and many of us have chosen to work inside the circle of those assumptions: genocide and mass violence are horrible acts committed by horrible people; we cannot stand by and do nothing; we have the responsibility to protect civilian populations and that responsibility takes the form, as a last resort, of military intervention. This paper analyzes the validity of such assumptions against different data about the levels of violence in the world and the use of the "human rights" discourse as a new and effective tool (a good idea!!) to justify the same "military interventions" and the violation of the soverignty produced in the past with worst excuses.