Documentation & Denial: The Fight to Expose Mass Atrocities

2017年底，数十万罗兴亚人涌入缅甸和孟加拉国边境，逃离缅甸军方手中的死亡。但是，即使人道主义工作者将难民遭受的虐待描述为“我们所见过的最严重的虐待”，缅甸政府仍将所有指控斥为“捏造的新闻”。缅甸在世界舞台上否认的同时，在国内，调查军方的记者遭到起诉和监禁，更不祥的是，携带智能手机的罗兴亚人被有针对性地杀害，这些智能手机可以用来记录屠杀。大规模暴行是国际制度的一个具有毁灭性的共同特征。但是，尽管很明显，肇事者利用了国际社会不愿干预的心理，但我们对信息方面的战略争论在助长暴行和鼓励国际不作为方面所起的作用并没有明确的认识。这个项目的目的是通过调查受害者揭露暴行的努力和实施者隐瞒暴行的企图，来描述大规模暴行是如何成为公众知识的。该项目将分析受害者和施暴者之间关于暴行证据的争论的微观动态。为了全面描述这些斗争是如何展开的，它将：1。1 .对暴行实施者否认暴行的内容进行分析，并对西方外交政策官员进行半结构化访谈，以了解暴行实施者如何使用修辞来保护自己免受国际干涉；采用一种深入深入的方法，对斯里兰卡泰米尔人和缅甸罗兴亚活动人士进行实地调查，并在当地和散居海外，以构建受害者如何记录暴行的画面；说谎。对两个案例研究中的倡导团体进行网络分析，以便绘制和分析暴行证据传播给国际受众的途径。该项目将对有关人权活动、镇压性国家行为、国际合作及其障碍的学术文献做出有意义的贡献，但它也将介入有关预防和惩罚大规模暴行的政策辩论，并为世界各地为结束暴行而斗争的活动家提供实用指导。这项研究的发现有可能通过提高预防和惩罚大规模暴行的机会，使世界上最脆弱和受冲突影响国家的一些最脆弱人口受益。

Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya poured across the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh in late 2017, fleeing death at the hands of Myanmar's military. But even as humanitarian workers described the abuses the refugees had suffered as "among the worst we've ever seen", Myanmar's government dismissed all allegations as "fabricated news". Myanmar's denials on the world stage were accompanied at home by the prosecution and imprisonment of journalists investigating the military, and even more ominously, by targeted killings of Rohingya carrying smartphones that could be used to document massacres. Mass atrocities are a devastatingly common feature of the international system. But although it is clear that perpetrators exploit the international community's reluctance to intervene, we do not have a clear understanding of the role that strategic contestation over information plays in facilitating the commission of atrocities and encouraging international inaction. This project's aim is to develop an account of how mass atrocities become public knowledge by examining victims' efforts to expose abuses and powerful perpetrators' attempts to conceal them. The project will analyze the micro-dynamics of contestation between victims and perpetrators over evidence of atrocities. To build a full account of how these struggles play out, it will: 1. perform content analysis of perpetrators' denials of atrocities and conduct semi-structured interviews of Western foreign policy officials in order to develop an understanding of how atrocity perpetrators use rhetoric to protect themselves from international interference;2. employ a deeply embedded approach to field research with Sri Lankan Tamil and Burmese Rohingya activists on the ground and in the diaspora in order to construct a picture of how victims document atrocities; and3. conduct a network analysis of advocacy communities in the two case studies in order to map and analyze the pathways by which evidence of atrocities travels to international audiences.This project will contribute meaningfully to academic literatures on human rights activism, repressive state behavior, and international cooperation and the obstacles thereto, but it will also intervene in policy debates on preventing and punishing mass atrocities and offer practical guidance to activists all over the world fighting to end atrocities. The findings of this research have the potential to benefit some of the most vulnerable populations in the world's most fragile and conflict-affected states by improving the chances that mass atrocities are prevented and punished.