The modernizing bias of human rights: stories of mass killings and genocide in Central America

Ekern, Stener

doi:10.1080/14623528.2010.528996

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…By tracking down more testimony about army massacres and exhuming more victims, the left hoped to reshape how ordinary Guatemalans remembered the war. To be politically useful, such memories would have to differ from the plague‐on‐both‐your‐houses attitude that so many war‐zone inhabitants shared with me and other researchers (Copeland 2011; Ekern 2010; Kobrak 2009; Le Bot 1995; Stoll 1993).…”

Section: The Postinsurgency Left Loses a Popularity Contest With Ríos...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such cases suggest that, going forward, war crimes at specific times and places will be a more resilient indictment than genocide. As Stener Ekern (2010, 238) has argued, so will crimes against humanity.…”

Section: Command Responsibility For War Crimes Would Have Been Easier...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Henrik Ronsbo and Walter Paniagua (2014) argue that international projects to support war victims have set up a “bureaucracy of loss” that reproduces racial hierarchies and subordinates Indigenous people to the Guatemalan state. Based on his experience with human rights advocacy in El Salvador and Guatemala, Stener Ekern (2010, 237–38) shows how translating local crimes into human rights categories can create a systemic disregard for how the victims and their neighbors view what happened.…”

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confidence: 99%

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How the Guatemalan civil war became a genocide: Revisiting the 2013 trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt

Stoll

2022

J Latin Amer Carib Anth

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The 2013 trial of Efraín Ríos Montt cemented Guatemala's reputation as a land of genocide. Most of the survivors who testified about army crimes during his 1982-1983 regime came from the Ixil Maya town of Nebaj. Oddly, some Nebajenses credit Ríos Montt with ending army massacres and saving their lives. This article focuses on the genocide debate in the municipio of Nebaj. It concludes that command responsibility for war crimes would have been a more effective indictment than genocide. K E Y WO R D SMayas, truth commissions, war crimes, racism, counterinsurgency ResumenEl juicio de 2013 contra Efraín Ríos Montt consolidó la reputación de Guatemala como tierra de genocidio. La mayoría de los sobrevivientes que testificaron sobre los crímenes del ejército bajo la administración de Montt (1982Montt ( -1983 pertenecían al pueblo maya ixil de Nebaj. Curiosamente algunos nebajenses dan crédito a Ríos Montt por poner fin a las masacres del ejército y salvarles la vida. Este artículo se centra en el debate sobre el genocidio en el municipio de Nebaj a través del análisis concluye que la responsabilidad de mando por crímenes de guerra habría sido una acusación más efectiva contra Ríos Montt que el genocidio.

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Section: The Postinsurgency Left Loses a Popularity Contest With Ríos...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Command Responsibility For War Crimes Would Have Been Easier...mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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How the Guatemalan civil war became a genocide: Revisiting the 2013 trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt

Stoll

2022

J Latin Amer Carib Anth

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“…Armed conflicts can have negative consequences for many aspects of health and social wellbeing [1234], including discrimination [56], mental health [7891011], substance abuse [12], hunger [13], health system performance [14], hospital productivity [15], economic development [16], human rights [17], and sexual violence [18]. Central America in general, and Guatemala in particular, is by some measures one of the most violent places in the world [1920].…”

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confidence: 99%

Peace in Guatemala and Immigrant Health in the United States

Green

Boakye

Schoening

et al. 2018

Annals of Global Health

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Background:The civil war between the indigenous Mayans and other Guatemalans lasted for 36 years, killed civilians, decimated villages, and resulted in many refugees. The Guatemalan Peace Agreement of 1996 aimed to alleviate the ongoing conflict. Studies of peace agreements more typically evaluate local political outcomes while neglecting global health outcomes.Objective:Our research quantified associations between pre-migration exposure to the peace agreement in Guatemala and the post-migration health status of Guatemalan immigrants in the United States.Methods:We used chi-square tests to compare the distribution of health status before and after peace. We used ordered probit regressions to estimate associations between peace in Guatemala and health in the United States, conditional on the observed distributions of age, age squared, age cubed, and linear time trends before and after peace.Findings:The study sample included 4,115 female and 5,282 male Guatemalan immigrants between the ages of 15 and 85. The mean age was 38.8 years for females (standard deviation, 14.2) and 35.4 years for males (standard deviation, 12.6). Chi-square tests found statistically significant differences in the distribution of health status before and after the peace agreement, for females (P < .001) and males (P < .001). In unadjusted results, the peace agreement was associated with a 7.3 percentage point increase in excellent post-migration health for females (95% confidence interval, 4.9 to 9.8) and a 6.0 percentage point increase for males (95% confidence interval, 3.8 to 8.2). In adjusted results, we found that the peace agreement was associated with a 6.1 percentage point increase in excellent post-migration health for females (95% confidence interval, 0.8 to 11.4) and a 5.5-percentage point increase for males (95% confidence interval, 1.0 to 10.0).Conclusions:The peace agreement in Guatemala was associated with statistically significant improvements in the health status of Guatemalan immigrants to the United States.

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Hidden politics of power and governmentality in transitional justice and peacebuilding: The problem of ‘bringing the local back in’

Obradović-Wochnik

2018

J Int Relat Dev

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and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. A version of this paper was presented at the International Studies Association Conference in New Orleans, 2015. (2016:7) asks, 'what dictates the terms and characteristics of what or who needs to be emancipated, how and in what direction'? This paper challenges the view of 'the local' as emancipatory and as a locus of resistance towards the 'international' peacebuilders (Bargues Pedreny 2016), by suggesting that 'the local'particularly when it is expressed as the 'civil society of the Western imaginary' (Richmond 2011:117)-can also be a site of exclusion, governmentality and hidden power relations. We need to look critically at the local-empowerment dynamic because current debates obscure the processes by which empowered locals can become marginalising elites, and enact exclusionary practices. The paper thus investigates how NGOs-key actors in 'local' transitional justice projects and local actors with the 'good' kind of local agency (Randazzo 2016)-become complicit in governance of 'the local', by making decisions about which (other local) marginalised voices are heard, and under what conditions. The paper thus proposes that 'the local' peacebuilders should also be conceptualised as a governing agents: able to discipline and regulate other local actors' voices (victims, former combatants) and their agency, further entrenching existing inequalities, or creating new ones (Englund 2006:7). Such inequalities and power asymmetries amongst local actors in peacebuilding contexts, are reproduced through externally-funded projects (Sampson 1996): short term activities funded by external donors, often implemented by local, liberal NGOs, premised on ideas about 'local ownership', and circumscribed by their own logic and technologies of power (Kurki 2011). Projects and external donor funding are crucial mechanisms of bringing peacebuilding concepts to life, given that in post-conflict countries, human rights and transitional justice NGOs often have trouble accessing domestic funding for their initiatives. Projects are thus crucial for norm diffusion and translation of global visions of post-conflict justice, but they are not equally accessible by, or inclusive of, all local actors (Kurki 2011; Vogel 2016). Power, as I argue, is enacted locally through internationally-funded projects. Projects (re)produce power hierarchies, regulatory practices, disciplinary rules and subjectification: in a Foucauldian sense, projects are sites of power. Here, elite actors (NGOs), create subjects such as 'victims' (Renner 2015) and decide how they ought to behave in transitional justice contexts. Peacebuilding and transitional justice literature rarely examine how 'locals' with such asymmetric power and ability to command international attention, shape visions of what the local is. Hence, this paper takes a Foucauldian approach to power and builds on Kurki's (2011) work on governmentality, to open up a discussion of the subtler forms of power enacted by loc...

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The modernizing bias of human rights: stories of mass killings and genocide in Central America

Cited by 3 publications

References 4 publications

How the Guatemalan civil war became a genocide: Revisiting the 2013 trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt

How the Guatemalan civil war became a genocide: Revisiting the 2013 trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt

Peace in Guatemala and Immigrant Health in the United States

Hidden politics of power and governmentality in transitional justice and peacebuilding: The problem of ‘bringing the local back in’

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