'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

On the bookshelf

These past few days I've been transitioning back into working on my "Violence and its Legacies" project, a.k.a. my book about Africa, and my reading's been starting to reflect that. (Okay, apart from my near-mandatory lunch-time read of the WaPo "Style" section.)

First up here on my bookshelf, actually, something that has very little to do with Africa. It's Loving Without Giving In; Christian Responses to Terrorism & Tyranny by Ron Mock. Ron is a really nice person, a sharp thinker and a clear writer, who is also an Evangelical Quaker. That's a slightly "different" bunch of Quakers from my lot... Let's just say "his" lot defines themselves as specifically Christian Evangelicals. Ron was a member of our International Quaker Working Party on Israel and Palestine, and I really came to like him, and admire his drafting skills while we were working together there.

So his book attempts to give a "Christian pacifist" take on how Americans should respond to the challenge of terrorism, in particular. It's really great that he's published the book-- especially because he writes it, as far as I can see, from entirely within an Evangelical Christian viewpoint. He takes Christian scripture very seriously; tries to reconcile the differences between the writings of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament; and lays out very clearly the different ways that different kinds of Christians look at war-and-peace issues before plumping firmly for a Christian pacifist worldview.

But mainly what I like about the book is the clarity and simplicity of his exposition, and the deep psychological truth that I see in most of what he writes. He writes, for example, about the corrosive effect that a deep-seated sense of grievance has on the person who holds it, as well as on society in general. He writes about how hatred can lead people to dehumanize their enemies. And he pleads, throughout, for people experiencing a sense to vulnerability to continue to try to see "that of God" (as Quakers say) even in the people whom they fear the most.

Second up, a tome from the U.N. University called The UN Role in Promoting Democracy; Between ideals and Reality , edited by Edward Newman and Roland Rich. This one looks really interesting. It has some weighty theoretical chapters, which I'm still getting through. But then, it has case studies: Namibia, Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Afghanistan. Shameless empiricist that I am, I can't wait to get to the case studies. Maybe I'll skip one or two of the theoretical chapters...

And finally, for now, a book that I'm quite enthralled by, My Neighbor, My Enemy; Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Atrocity , edited by Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein. (That's not Harvey Weinstein, half-owner of Miramax.)

This book is the fruit of a broad, multi-year project run out of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center in which researchers looked at the effects on community mental health and attitudes of various steps taken to deal with the aftermath of atrocities in rwanda and former Yugoslavia. Well, my project is looking (in a slightly different way) at exactly that same issue in Rwanda-- but comparing it not with former Yugoslavia but with two other cases in southern Africa: South Africa and Mozambique...

But we're all looking at a large number of the same issues. And instead of having one dogged researcher perennially short of funds (me), their project apparently had whole teams of people doing various different kinds of social-science, human-rights, and community mental-health research in the two societies they studied.

The book is an impressive and fascinating production. I met Weinstein at a conference last year and really liked both him and his determinedly community-based (and quasi epidemiological) approach to issues of mental-wellbeing. Though the book does not deal explicitly with the kind of global policy issues I am looking at, the evidence it presents goes quite far toward challenging much of the "received wisdom" in the international community these days, i.e. that what people really "need" in the aftermath of widespread atrocity is some broad application of western ethno-justice. Indeed, it gives a lot of evidence that directly challenges the ideas that participating in a western-style court proceeding is necessarily therapeutic for individual survivors of atrocities, or that the work of such courts necessarily ever helps broader societiesthat are caught up in such violence to heal.

Right now, I'm in the middle of reading a great chapter titled, "Memory, identity, and community in Rwanda". Using survey data, focus groups, and other tools of social science it tries to critically assess the current Rwandan government's attempt to promulgate its own, highly structured and monolithic view of the histrocial antecedents of the 1994 genocide. The chapter includes this:

while most respondents were able to present an account of the government's narrative of Rwandan history, many also expressed skepticism about how history is interpreted and used by those in power. For example, a 50-year-old man in a Kibuya focus group said, after a long discussion of rwanda's history: "The reason for our preoccupation [with history] is that whoever achieves power wants to refashion the history of rwanda. There is no consensus and no national vision." In our survey, 49.2 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement "Whoever is in power rewrites rwandan history to serve their own interests," while only 21.7 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed." (pp.169-70)

Interesting stuff... Anyway, these last two books are great ways for me to get into my Africa project. I need to write the back third of my Africa book by about the end of March. Yikes!