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ID: 164644

Charge of genocide: racial hierarchy, political discourse, and the evolution of international institutions / Meiches, Benjamin

Meiches, Benjamin	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

This article examines the role of racism in the development of genocide prevention and humanitarian intervention. It offers a brief history of the We Charge Genocide petition during the early 1950s. This petition demonstrated the potential for the emerging international law on genocide to challenge prevailing racial hierarchy. The movement triggered potent racialized anxieties amongst the United States and other colonial powers. Partly as a consequence of this movement, genocide was undermined as a potent international discourse. This article shows how decades later the renewed interest in genocide emerged without any sense of the connections between genocide discourse and protests against racial inequity. As a result, the antigenocide regime viewed genocide principally as a problem of state power rather than racial and colonial hierarchies. This ultimately fostered the development of a postracial regime of global governance in humanitarian institutions, which understand racial conflict as a site of political management rather than a factor in the formation of inequity and violence. The article describes how the suppression of these early struggles for racial justice depoliticized many of the sources of mass violence in the present and influenced the trajectory of practices of humanitarian intervention and genocide prevention.

Key Words

Political Discourse ; Racial Hierarchy ; Evolution of International Institutions

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ID: 141306

Perverse politics: the persistence of mass imprisonment in the twenty-first century / Thorpe, Rebecca U

Thorpe, Rebecca U	Article
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I examine the political consequences of prison development in the United States. I theorize that the prison apparatus not only upholds a system of racial hierarchy and class stratification, but also links the economic stability of lower-class, rural whites to the continued penal confinement of poor, urban minorities. Analysis of an original dataset suggests that local reliance on existing prison infrastructure throughout many economically-depressed rural communities strengthens political support for harsh criminal punishments and militates against reform efforts. Political representatives have powerful interests in protecting rural prison investments, regardless of their actual economic impact in host communities. The evidence indicates that rural prison development contributes to the perceived economic viability and political power of rural areas, while reinforcing forms of punishment that destabilize poor urban neighborhoods and harm politically marginalized populations.

Key Words

United States ; Political Power ; Twenty-first century ; Rural Areas ; Persistence ; Political Consequences ;
Perverse Politics ; Mass Imprisonment ; Racial Hierarchy ; Political Representatives

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