Wahutu: What was the main motivation behind this current book, Representing
Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur?
Prof.
Savelsberg: You know that I have a longstanding
interest in the way in which institutions of justice, and currently
transitional justice, affect collective representations or collective memories
of events, especially mass atrocities. And so, the motivation for this book on
Darfur was to understand how interventions by the UN Security Council and the
International Criminal Court (ICC) affect how global civil society thinks about such
events, the way people imagine such events. And, part of the original design
was to do a comparative study of eight countries. Even though the ICC is a
global institution, the kinds of messages that it sends out, the kinds of
representation of events that it offers are filtered by national institutions,
they are reinforced by carrier groups in one country, but less so in another
country. They find more receptive audiences in a country that has maybe dealt
with mass atrocities in the past than in another country that hasn’t. So that
was the main motivation, to understand how interventions, in this case by the
UN Security Council and the ICC, affect the representation of Darfur in the
public sphere. Initially I only thought of news media, that’s why we did a
comparative analysis of newspapers in eight countries. And then, in the course
of the research, I became aware that representations do not just differ by
country but also by social fields. I was interested from the beginning in how
human rights activists, and I selected Amnesty International as an example,
talk about Darfur. How they reflect on the interventions by the ICC and the UN
Security Council. But in my interviews I also ended up targeting a humanitarian
aid NGO , for which I picked Doctors without Borders. I additionally interviewed
diplomats from foreign ministries, or state departments if you want, and I saw
that different fields talk in quite different terms about the violence in
Darfur. Just as I was interested in the country-specific conditions that lead
to a selective communication of ICC representations, so I became interested in
the field-specific conditions that affect communication about Darfur.
Wahutu:
Previous work has not done this much data
collection or analysis. From what you
have said, the data collection and analysis seems like a really important part of
how you wanted to do this project. Why
was it important for you to do the interviews, to do the content analysis of
news reports and travel to all of these countries?
Prof.
Savelsberg: It was important for a number of
reasons. The first reason is that we know that global institutions of justice
like the ICC are extremely modern. Human history hasn’t really known them. We’ve
known ad hoc courts in the twentieth century, but not a permanent international
criminal court. We have very little systematic knowledge about the effects of
these institutions. It would be desirable of course to measure the effect of
ICC interventions on the future likelihood of genocide and crimes against
humanity and war crimes. That would be a very tall order, and we will have
to tackle this at some point. I wasn’t able to go that far, but one interim step
is to think about how these interventions affect the way the world thinks about
mass atrocities. It is not at all for granted that people in different
countries take note of what is going on. Even if institutions like the ICC
intervene, there is a long history of denial, of closing one’s eyes, especially
if atrocities occur in a far-away place in the world. So it was very important
to me to begin to systematically measure the effects of these sorts of interventions
in a cautious way, by first looking at the impact they have on the degree to which and the way in which mass
atrocities are represented and perceived.
Wahutu:
What would you say was one of the most surprising
findings that jumped out at you?
Prof.
Savelsberg: There a re a number of surprising findings.
One of the things that really impressed me was when I conducted my interviews
among diplomats who were interested in negotiating deals with the Sudanese
government to establish peace; with humanitarian aid people who were interested
in getting their aid on the ground and collaborating, say, with the Sudanese
ministry of health; and with human rights activists. To see the seriousness
with which all of these actors, many of whom impressed me deeply, pursued what
they were doing. How at the same time their views of the violence differed
depending on the role that especially the Sudanese state played in their respective
fields. Diplomats need to negotiate with the Sudanese state, humanitarian aid
workers need to collaborate with administrative units of the Sudanese state,
and human rights activists don’t do that.
But many of these people had been to Darfur, they had worked on the
ground, they had also – the same is true for Africa correspondents - left the
comfort of their homes in Philadelphia or Berlin or London only to spend years
in rather tough settings, to witness situations that are not easy for people to
bear. So many of these people impressed me profoundly. At the same time, I took
note that each of them had a different view of the violence on the ground. So
this is, if you want, a kind of sociology of knowledge exercise. You see how
the world and events in the world take different shape, appear in a different
light, when seen through different lenses, through different frames. So that’s
one thing that surprised me and then there were many little observations
pertaining to national particularities. For example we found in our media
analysis that the term genocide was used relatively rarely in German news reports,
which to me was counter intuitive, given Germany’s history of the Holocaust.
But, in the interviews I conducted, I got a number of suggestions as to how to
interpret such a finding. One Africa correspondent for a prominent German
newspaper said that when he thought of genocide, he categorised the Holocaust
under that label, and while knowing how horrific things were in Darfur, he had
a hard time placing Darfur under the same category where in his mind the Holocaust
was already placed. Or, the director of a major national Holocaust memorial
institution in Germany said that the Americans could draw parallels between the
Holocaust and Darfur - and this is a man who is a Rabbi and a son of an
Auschwitz survivor - but as Germans, he said, we could not do that because as
soon Germans drew a parallel between the Holocaust and events such as Darfur
people would accuse them of trying to relativize what happened during the Holocaust.
So there are cultural sensitivities in specific countries -- and this is just
one example from the German part of the study -- that filter and generate caution towards the use of
certain terms. Clearly Germay differs from the United States, for example, where
the use of the term genocide and metaphorical bridging to the Holocaust was used
very generously, and the explanation is relatively simple. It has to do with the
strength of the Save Darfur movement in the US, and this strength had to do
with the fact that there were a number of, in Weberian or Mannheimian terms,
carrier groups that identified with the cause of Darfur. So there were African
Americans who identified with the victims who were defined as ‘black Africans’.
There were American Jews who, after the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington
issued a genocide alert, identified with this cause, and there were evangelical
Christians on the conservative side of the political spectrum who had done a
lot of missionary work, not in Darfur but in South Sudan, but who therefore
were quite sensitive to human rights violations in that country. So you have
Germany and the United States as two examples where country specific
sensitivities and carrier groups contribute to a different reception of the
events in Darfur. At the same time both the United States and Germany were the
two countries that stood out in terms of the intensity of reporting. German cultural
sensitivities thus do not mean that German journalists didn’t take note, quite
the opposite, despite their cautious use of the term genocide. The other
noteworthy result is that indeed certain interventions by institutions like the
ICC revived, every time they occurred, global interest in Darfur. The
flattening of the pattern of attention that normally occurs soon after
instances of mass violence was thus delayed by three or four years in the case
of Darfur. The other noteworthy finding
is that definitions by the criminal justice system are more strongly reflected
in media reporting than the representation
of events by diplomats or humanitarian aid organizations. Why this is the case
is a separate question, and I have some ideas about this that I explore in the
book. I have found similar patterns, by the way, on previous occasions like in
my study on the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.
Wahutu:
What message do you hope a reader of your book gets
from it when they read it?
Prof.
Savelsberg: I think that the book would help people
understand how mass violence that occurs in the global south, for example in Darfur,
goes through a number of processes and filters before news about it reach us as
member of civil society; understand the cultural and structural processes and
the institutions that are embedded in different fields and that are associated with
different countries; understand how that which happens on the ground, which
almost none of us, very few people, will observe with our own eyes, reaches us
as members of civil society, or maybe of global society; understand the process
through which those events are filtered, or constructed if you want. So this
helps us understand what it is that we learn about through public information
about mass violence in the global south.
Wahutu:
So what you are saying is that for a reader you
hope that the message is that by the time they watch, read or hear about on
going atrocities such as Darfur, they remember that it goes through several
filtering processes to get to them. As such, is it then upon the reader to be a
bit more active in seeking more information and seeking more diverse voices?
Prof.
Savelsberg: Yes, I think the book provides us with the
critical tools that we need in order to be mature consumers of these kinds of
news. We read the news and, having read this book about Representing Mass
Violence, we are in better position to understand what processes the events as
they were written about and described have gone through before they reach us.
Wahutu:
What are some of the challenges in writing such a
book? You talk to professionals and practitioners form such diverse walks of
life who, as much as they are dealing with getting the message out, have
different constituencies. So what are some of the challenges in trying to
navigate that terrain?
Prof.
Savelsberg: Well, the main challenge was the huge
effort at data collection. The media analysis had five research assistants who analysed
more than 3000 news articles. To conduct
the interview meant travelling to Berlin, Paris, London, Dublin, Zurich,
Geneva, Vienna, Washington, New York, and so many other places. So it was a
major effort just to collect the data. In the interview situations, it was
important to capture the voices of these different actors that operate in distinct
fields, not to impose of them my understanding of the situation, but to
minimise the interviewer effect and to get their perception as clearly as
possible. I think I succeeded in this, especially since people are so embedded
in their fields; the way they see the world thus is so matter of course to them,
and is reinforced by the institutions and educational process they have been
exposed to.
Wahutu:
So onto my last question. You book is available to download
for free, what was the thinking behind that?
Prof.
Savelsberg: For the publisher, the University of
California Press, the thinking behind this was that books used to sell many
copies to university libraries, which brought in their expenses, on the average
anyway, so they didn’t run a deficit. University libraries have change their
purchasing practices. They have smaller budgets now, they can’t buy as many
books, and they buy more electronic sources than paper products. So the presses
are really under pressure to come up with new models of funding publications.
In my case they offered me either to go the traditional way or to use this
innovative model, and I chose the innovative way for a number of reasons. An
important reason is that I think this mechanism will allow for a better
distribution of the book, and especially a book dealing with mass violence in
the global south, in which many people who’d be interested in the subject don’t
have an easy time to just write somewhere and order a paper copy and pay for
it. So this model will increase availability particularly in those parts of the
world that I would like to reach with my book but that may not as easily get a
hold of the paper copy. Do I pay a price for it? Yes I had to waive any
royalties, but that was easy for me to do.
Wahutu:
Thank you so much for agreeing to do this.
Prof.
Savelsberg: You are welcome, Wahutu.
