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Fall 2008 Courses (PDF)

War, the Law, and Human Rights

"Attacks against civilians are probably inevitable in any supposedly humanitarian intervention. Every nation has the right to defend itself, and at the level of practical politics, a nation that is attacked will try to resist the attacker. Winning the war thus requires defeating not only the army, but the nation: the civilian population. Thus the decision to attack a sovereign state is, logically, a decision to attack the civilian population of that state, not just the military. NATO's targeting of the civilian infrastructure of Serbia (and earlier, of Iraq), is thus logical, and the constant repetition that "NATO never targets civilians" was hypocritical, presumably meant to obscure the uncomfortable fact that humanitarian intervention requires the committing of humanitarian war crimes. At this point, the greatest triumph of the human rights movement, "humanitarian intervention," is revealed as its greatest defeat, because it transforms what had been a moral critique against state violence into a moral crusade for massive violence by stronger states against weaker ones. "

Robert M. Hayden, "Biased 'Justice:' Humanrightsism and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia," Cleveland State Law Review 47 (#4): 571 (1999).

Serbian post cards of NATO bombing

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"The geography of the violence is an important consideration, because the wars in Yugoslavia since 1991 have taken place almost entirely within regions that were the most "mixed," where the various nations of Yugoslavia were most intermingled. The extraordinary violence that has shattered these places was not the "fury of nationalist passions long repressed by communism," as many journalists and politicians would have it. Instead, I argue that the wars have been about the forcible unmixing of peoples whose continuing coexistence was counter to the political ideologies that won in the democratic elections of 1990. Thus extreme nationalism in the former Yugoslavia has not been only a matter of imagining allegedly "primordial" communities, but rather of making existing heterogenous ones unimaginable. In formal terms, the point has been to implement an essentialist definition of the nation and its state in regions where the intermingled population formed living disproof of its validity: the brutal negation of social reality in order to reconstruct it."

Robert M. Hayden, "Imagined Communities and Real Victims: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in Yugoslavia." American Ethnologist 23 (#4): 783-84 (1996).

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"When rape avoidance is put into the analysis of ethnic or nationalist conflict the meaning of mass rape itself becomes more clear: it is a tool used to partition permanently an already consciously heterogenous population at the time when the territory in which these people(s) live is being divided physically. Thus mass rape is actually a corollary of the liminality of the state when a heterogenous territory is being sundered into homogenous parts. Looked at in this way, a number of assumptions about mass rape are brought into question, such as that rapists are driven by hatred. To the contrary, many rapists themselves are conflicted, but their acts are meant to induce hatred in the victims."

Robert M. Hayden, "Rape and Rape Avoidance in Ethno-National Conflicts: Sexual Violence in Liminalized States." American Anthropologist 102 (#1): 36 (2000).