TOK Teacher
How do nations struggle with mass violence and the rule of law? How do communities work to achieve reconciliation, repair dispossession, and remember those lost? Genocide and mass violence, past and present, raise all of these complex concerns and more.
The rule of law presents a path for nations to create a just and humane world. Our resources on human rights examine international systems of justice developed in response to mass violence, past and present. These encompass struggles around racism, religious intolerance, national origin, gender and sexuality, and sexual expression.
The committee that awarded the Nobel peace prize to Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991 described her as “an important symbol in the struggle against oppression” and an inspiration to those “striving to attain democracy, human rights and ethnic conciliation by peaceful means”. But to the crowd of protesters who gathered outside the International Court of Justice (icj) in The Hague this week, she is just the opposite: an apologist for military brutality, an oppressor of ethnic minorities and an abettor of genocide. “Aung San Suu Kyi, shame on you!” they chanted. As her motorcade glided past, windows tinted, the jeers and boos rose in a crescendo.
Coherent lesson plan and materials designed to introduce students to contemporary issues surrounding refugees.
https://www.choices.edu/teaching-news-lesson/refugee-stories-mapping-crisis/
Meanwhile, the debate about intervention for human protection purposes has not gone away. And it will not go away so long as human nature remains as fallible as it is and internal conflict and state failures stay as prevalent as they are. The debate was certainly a lively one throughout the 1990s. Controversy may have been muted in the case of the interventions, by varying casts of actors, in Liberia in 1990, northern Iraq in 1991, Haiti in 1994, Sierra Leone in 1997, and (not strictly coercively) East Timor in 1999. But in Somalia in 1993, Rwanda in 1994, and Bosnia in 1995, the UN action taken (if taken at all) was widely perceived as too little too late, misconceived, poorly resourced, poorly executed, or all of the above. During NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo, Security Council members were sharply divided; the legal justification for action without UN authority was asserted but largely unargued; and great misgivings surrounded the means by which the allies waged the war.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2002-11-01/responsibility-protect
Militaries can no longer kill their way out of problems in a global information age, and this is driving war into the shadows. Today, plausible deniability is more potent than firepower: winners and losers are no longer decided on the battlefield, but by those who can discern truth from lies. The best weapons today don’t fire bullets.
The US, which deploys more drones than any other country, has exploited the gaps in international law to fight its war on terror.
The principle of humanity requires avoiding unnecessary harm to civilians. The fundamental rationale for drone use relies on this principle: drone capacity for precise targeting can save civilian lives. US Air Force General T Michael Moseley calls this the “true hunter-killer role” of drones. Given that there were, for example, two million civilian deaths in the Korean War alone, the precision of drone strikes offers a persuasive moral argument in favour of their use
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2019/11/are-drone-strikes-ever-ethical
The Good Friday Agreement was born of the most painstaking talks I ever took part in. Now our prime minister threatens to rip it apart
Crucial to maintenance of the peace was the idea of an open border between north and south in recognition of the fact that around the border families intermingled, did business and trade and moved, often several times a day, across it. They were separate countries but treated for the practical purposes of daily life as if they were the same.
Samantha Power made a career arguing for America’s “responsibility to protect.” During her years in the White House, it became clear that benevolent motives can have calamitous results.
The book inspired a generation of activists, helping to establish the doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” which held that the United States and other wealthy countries had an obligation to defend threatened populations around the world. It also made a star of its author, a charismatic, cracklingly smart presence who urged others to take up the cause. “Know that history is not in a hurry but that you can help speed it up,” she told Yale’s graduating class of 2016. “It is the struggle itself that will define you. Do that, and you will not only find yourself fulfilled but you, too, will live to see many of your lost causes found.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/16/the-moral-logic-of-humanitarian-intervention
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