Public Health, Mental Health, and Mass Atrocity Prevention

Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, Caitlin O. Mahoney, Amy E. Meade, Arlan F. Fuller, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, Caitlin Mahoney, Amy Meade, Arlan Fuller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000414240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This multidisciplinary volume considers the role of both public health and mental health policies and practices in the prevention of mass atrocity, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

The authors address atrocity prevention through the framework of primary (pre-conflict), secondary (mid-conflict), and tertiary (post-conflict) settings. They examine the ways in which public health and mental health scholars and practitioners currently orient their research and interventions and the ways in which we can adapt frameworks, methods, tools, and practice toward a more sophisticated and truly interdisciplinary understanding and application of atrocity prevention. The book brings together diverse fields of study by global north and global south authors in diverse contexts. It culminates in a narrative that demonstrates the state of the current fields on intersecting themes within public health, mental health, and mass atrocity prevention and the future potential directions in which these intersections could go. Such discussions will serve to influence both policy makers and practitioners in these fields toward developing, adapting, and testing frames and tools for atrocity prevention. Multidisciplinary perspectives are represented among editors and authors, including law, political science, international studies, public health, mental health, philosophy, clinical psychology, social psychology, history, and peace studies.

PART I

Linking concepts of public health, mental health, and mass atrocity prevention

1

(RE)CONCEPTUALIZING ATROCITY CRIMES AS PUBLIC HEALTH CATASTROPHES

Randle C. DeFalco

I Introduction: the current framing of atrocities as violent spectacles

In recent years, questions of global justice and human rights have increasingly been viewed through the lens of international criminal justice.¹ Consequently, whether a particular situation is viewed as involving the apparent commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, and/or war crimes (the so-called “core” international crimes)² has become an important consideration in determining how much attention will be paid to such situations, to those victimized, and to those potentially responsible. One implication of this myopic focus on international criminal law has been an increase in the importance of what forms of violence and harm are, and are not, socially and legally recognized as means through which genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes may be committed.

Elsewhere, I have argued that the way in which differing forms of violence and abuse manifest themselves, in an aesthetic sense, plays a significant, if largely overlooked, role in determining whether such forms of harm are recognized as potential international crimes.³ Dominant shared understandings of international “atrocity” crimes—since even before the inception of contemporary international criminal law in the wake of World War II—have remained grounded in the aesthetics of violent spectacle.⁴ I contend that there exists an unstated yet broadly shared assumption that international crimes necessarily involve the commission of spectacular acts of violence, which are both highly visible and intuitively recognizable as being “criminal” in nature.⁵ This assumption leads to international crimes committed through aesthetically unfamiliar methods, such as slow or attritive violence, socioeconomic oppression, enforcement of famine conditions,⁶ and other means of interfering with the basic survival needs of victim groups being improperly viewed as inherently noncriminal in nature.⁷ Consequently, rather than being viewed as “unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock the conscience of humanity” and amongst “the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole” that “threaten the peace, security and well-being of the world,”⁸ such forms of atrocity violence tend to be viewed by key actors (states, intergovernmental organizations, courts, judges, diplomats, news media, etc.) as less serious and more causally ambiguous human rights, humanitarian, or development issues. Of course, those who experience slow or attritive forms of mass violence are unlikely to draw such distinctions.⁹

1 Karen Engle, “Anti-Impunity and the Turn to Criminal Law in Human Rights,” Cornell Law Review 100, no. 5 (2015): 1069.

2 On the concept of core crimes, Christine Schwöbel-Patel, “The Core Crimes of International Criminal Law,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law, eds. Kevin Heller et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 768–790.

3 Randle DeFalco, “International Crimes as Familiar Spectacles: Socially Constructed Understandings of Atrocity and the Visibility Politics of International Criminal Law,” University of Toronto, School of Graduate Studies - Theses (2017).

4 DeFalco, “International Crimes,” 32–63.

5 DeFalco, “International Crimes,” 32–63.

6 There is increasing acknowledgment under international criminal law that under certain circumstances, the enforcement of famine conditions may involve the commission of international crimes. For example, the Rome Statute was amended in 2019 to make the intentional use of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare a war crime in both international and non-international armed conflicts. International Criminal Court Assembly of States Parties Working Group, “Report of the Working Group on Amendments,” Doc. No. ICC-ASP/18/32 (December 2–7, 2019), paras. 9–14, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP18/ICC-ASP-18-32-ENG.pdf and “Resolution on Amendments to Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” Doc No. ICC-ASP/18/Res. 5 (adopted December 6, 2019), https://asp.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP18/ICC-ASP-18-Res5-ENG.pdf. However, these provisions in the Rome Statute have not yet been prosecuted as war crimes and appear to be limited to situations involving the intentional, strategic use of starvation tactics, applying only to a narrow subset of famine and starvation situations. More often, famine and starvation are the predictable outcomes of actions and policies not specifically designed to cause starvation and occur both during and outside the context of armed conflicts. Hence, the Rome Statute, even as amended, only specifically addresses a very narrow subset of starvation scenarios.

7 DeFalco, “International Crimes,” 66–111. For research on these atrocity processes, Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley, “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya,” Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal 23 (2014): 683; Kiera Ladner, “Political Genocide: Killing Nations through Legislation and Slow-Moving Poison,” in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America., eds. Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 226–245; Kjell Anderson, “Colonialism and Cold Genocide: The Case of West Papua,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 9, no. 2 (2015): 9–25; Maria Cheung et al., “Cold Genocide: Falun Gong in China,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 12, no. 1 (2018): 38; Andrew Woolford and Jeff Benvenuto, “Canada and Colonial Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 17, no. 4 (2015): 373; Alexander Laban Hinton, “Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America,” in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America: A View from Critical Genocide Studies, eds. Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 325–332; Evelyne Schmid, Taking Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Seriously in International Criminal Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Eamon Aloyo, “Improving Global Accountability: The ICC and Nonviolent Crimes against Humanity,” Global Constitutionalism 2, no. 3 (2013): 498; Andrew Basso, “Towards a Theory of Displacement Atrocities: The Cherokee Trail of Tears, The Herero Genocide, and The Pontic Greek Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 10, no. 1 (2016): 5; Marijke Verpoorten, “Detecting Hidden Violence: The Spatial Distribution of Excess Mortality in Rwanda,” Political Geography 31, no. 1 (2012): 44; Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, eds., Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014); Randle DeFalco, “Conceptualizing Famine as a Subject of International Criminal Justice: Towards a Modality-Based Approach,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 38, no. 4 (2017): 1113; Alex de Waal, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine (Cambridge: Polity, 2018); and Sheri Rosenberg and Everita Silina, “Genocide by Attrition: Silent and Efficient,” in Genocide Matters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives, ed. Joyce Apsel and Ernesto Verdeja (New York: Routledge, 2013), 106.

8 UN General Assembly, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (last amended 2010), July 17, 1998, https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3a84.html.

9 While more research is warranted into how different social groups perceive themselves and conceptualize the varying forms of violence they experience, in the author’s specific experience working with survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, banal, everyday forms of oppression and violence were very much central aspects of how survivors characterized the “crimes” they and those around them experienced under the regime. Randle DeFalco, “Justice and Starvation in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge Famine,” Cambodia Law and Policy Journal 3 (2014): 45, 46–49.

By focusing myopically on aesthetically familiar atrocities committed through spectacularly violent means, international criminal justice fails to recognize the full array of processes through which genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes may be committed. As group crimes, often involving state actors, these crimes may be committed through myriad means.¹⁰ Moreover, as Frédéric Mégret reminds us, criminal justice itself is “in the end, nothing more than…a particular technique, a means to an end rather than an end in itself,” and accordingly, no set of transgressions or normative aims are necessarily “presupposed by the very idea of crimina...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Author biographies
• Contributors list
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Linking concepts of public health, mental health, and mass atrocity prevention
• Part II Supporting mental and public health prevention work in pre-atrocity, atrocity, and post-atrocity settings
• Part III Group identity, victim impact, and community relationships in atrocity contexts
• Part IV Ways forward
• Conclusion
• Index