Documentation & Denial: The Fight to Expose Mass Atrocities

2017年底，数十万罗辛亚族人涌入缅甸和孟加拉国边境，逃离缅甸军方的死亡。但就在人道主义工作人员将难民遭受的虐待描述为“我们所见过的最糟糕的事件之一”时，缅甸政府驳斥了所有指控，称其为“捏造的新闻”。缅甸在世界舞台上的否认，伴随着调查军方的记者在国内遭到起诉和监禁，更糟糕的是，罗辛亚人被有针对性地杀害，他们携带的智能手机可以用来记录大屠杀。大规模暴行是国际体系的一个毁灭性的共同特征。但是，尽管犯罪者显然利用了国际社会不愿干预的情况，但我们并不清楚关于信息的战略争辩在促进实施暴行和鼓励国际社会不采取行动方面所起的作用。该项目的目的是通过审查受害者揭露虐待行为的努力和强大的肇事者试图隐瞒这些暴行，来说明大规模暴行如何成为公众所知。该项目将分析受害者和肇事者之间关于暴行证据的争论的微观动态。为了全面了解这些斗争的结果，它将：1.对肇事者否认暴行的情况进行内容分析，并对西方外交政策官员进行半结构化访谈，以了解暴行肇事者如何利用言辞保护自己免受国际干预；2.对斯里兰卡泰米尔人和缅甸罗辛亚活动家在当地和海外的实地研究采取深入的方法，以构建受害者如何记录暴行的图景；3.在两个案例研究中对倡导团体进行网络分析，以绘制和分析暴行证据向国际观众传播的途径。该项目将对有关人权活动、镇压国家行为、国际合作及其障碍的学术文献做出有意义的贡献，但它也将介入关于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战的活动家提供实践指导。这项研究的结果有可能通过增加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的国家的一些最脆弱的人口受益。

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.