Killing Neighbors

Author: Lee Ann Fujii
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801458617
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
In the horrific events of the mid-1990s in Rwanda, tens of thousands of Hutu killed their Tutsi friends, neighbors, even family members. That ghastly violence has overshadowed a fact almost as noteworthy: that hundreds of thousands of Hutu killed no one. In a transformative revisiting of the motives behind and specific contexts surrounding the Rwandan genocide, Lee Ann Fujii focuses on individual actions rather than sweeping categories. Fujii argues that ethnic hatred and fear do not satisfactorily explain the mobilization of Rwandans one against another. Fujii's extensive interviews in Rwandan prisons and two rural communities form the basis for her claim that mass participation in the genocide was not the result of ethnic antagonisms. Rather, the social context of action was critical. Strong group dynamics and established local ties shaped patterns of recruitment for and participation in the genocide. This web of social interactions bound people to power holders and killing groups. People joined and continued to participate in the genocide over time, Fujii shows, because killing in large groups conferred identity on those who acted destructively. The perpetrators of the genocide produced new groups centered on destroying prior bonds by killing kith and kin.

Killing Your Neighbors

Author: Jon Holtzman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520291921
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
"One of the most disturbing spectacles of recent decades has been brutal acts of genocidal violence committed among neighboring communities who once lived together in peace: ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia; the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda; or the Sunni versus Shia violence in today's Iraq. As these cases illustrate, lethal violence does not always come at the hands of outsiders or foreigners. Rather, it can just as easily come at the hand of someone who once was considered a friend. Killing Our Neighbors employs a multi-sited approach and multi-vocal ethnography to examine how once-peaceful neighbors become transformed into perpetrators and victims of lethal violence. It engages with a set of interlocking case studies in northern Kenya, focusing on sometimes-peaceful, sometimes violent interactions between Samburu herders and neighboring groups, interweaving Samburu narratives of key violent events with the narratives of neighboring groups on the other side of the same encounters. The book is, on one hand, an ethnography of particular people in a particular place, vividly portraying the complex and confusing dynamics of interethnic violence through the lives, words and intimate experiences of individuals variously involved in and affected by these conflicts. At the same time the book aims to use this particular case study to illustrate how the dynamics in northern Kenya provides comparative insights to well-known, compelling contexts of violence around the globe"--Provided by publisher.

The Killing Compartments

Author: Abram de Swaan
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300210671
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
The twentieth century was among the bloodiest in the history of humanity. Untold millions were slaughtered. How people are enrolled in the service of evil is a question that continues to bedevil. In this trenchant book, Abram de Swaan offers a taxonomy of mass violence that focuses on the rank-and-file perpetrators, examining how murderous regimes recruit them and create what De Swaan calls the "killing compartments” that make possible the worst abominations without apparent moral misgiving, without a sense of personal responsibility, and, above all, without pity. De Swaan wonders where extreme violence comes from and where it goes—seemingly without a trace—when the wild and barbaric gore is over. And what about the perpetrators themselves? Are they merely and only the product of external circumstance? Or is there something in their makeup that disposes them to become mass murderers? Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, political science, history, and psychology, De Swaan sheds new light on an urgent and intractable pathology that continues to poison peoples all over the world.

Show Time

Author: Lee Ann Fujii
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501758551
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
In Show Time, Lee Ann Fujii asks why some perpetrators of political violence, from lynch mobs to genocidal killers, display their acts of violence so publicly and extravagantly. Closely examining three horrific and extreme episodes—the murder of a prominent Tutsi family amidst the genocide in Rwanda, the execution of Muslim men in a Serb-controlled village in Bosnia during the Balkan Wars, and the lynching of a twenty-two-year old Black farmhand on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1933—Fujii shows how "violent displays" are staged to not merely to kill those perceived to be enemies or threats, but also to affect and influence observers, neighbors, and the larger society. Watching and participating in these violent displays profoundly transforms those involved, reinforcing political identities, social hierarchies, and power structures. Such public spectacles of violence also force members of the community to choose sides—openly show support for the goals of the violence, or risk becoming victims, themselves. Tracing the ways in which public displays of violence unfold, Show Time reveals how the perpetrators exploit the fluidity of social ties for their own ends.

Neighbors

Author: Jan T. Gross
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
A landmark book that changed the story of Poland’s role in the Holocaust On July 10, 1941, in Nazi-occupied Poland, half of the town of Jedwabne brutally murdered the other half: 1,600 men, women, and children—all but seven of the town’s Jews. In this shocking and compelling classic of Holocaust history, Jan Gross reveals how Jedwabne’s Jews were murdered not by faceless Nazis but by people who knew them well—their non-Jewish Polish neighbors. A previously untold story of the complicity of non-Germans in the extermination of the Jews, Neighbors shows how people victimized by the Nazis could at the same time victimize their Jewish fellow citizens. In a new preface, Gross reflects on the book’s explosive international impact and the backlash it continues to provoke from right-wing Polish nationalists who still deny their ancestors’ role in the destruction of the Jews.

Good Neighbors

Author: Sarah Langan
Publisher: Atria Books
ISBN: 198217143X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
“A modern-day Crucible….Beneath the surface of a suburban utopia, madness lurks.” —Liv Constantine, bestselling author of The Last Mrs. Parrish “Sarah Langan is a phenomenal talent with a wicked sense of wry humor. Good Neighbors knocked me out. Like Shirley Jackson, Langan’s work blends a bleak streak with an underlying sense of the humane that wrung my heart.” —Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling Celeste Ng’s enthralling dissection of suburbia meets Shirley Jackson’s creeping dread in this propulsive literary noir, when a sudden tragedy exposes the depths of deception and damage in a Long Island suburb—pitting neighbor against neighbor and putting one family in terrible danger. Welcome to Maple Street, a picture-perfect slice of suburban Long Island, its residents bound by their children, their work, and their illusion of safety in a rapidly changing world. Arlo Wilde, a gruff has-been rock star who’s got nothing to show for his fame but track marks, is always two steps behind the other dads. His wife, beautiful ex-pageant queen Gertie, feels socially ostracized and adrift. Spunky preteen Julie curses like a sailor and her kid brother Larry is called “Robot Boy” by the kids on the block. Their next-door neighbor and Maple Street’s Queen Bee, Rhea Schroeder—a lonely community college professor repressing her own dark past—welcomes Gertie and family into the fold. Then, during one spritzer-fueled summer evening, the new best friends share too much, too soon. As tensions mount, a sinkhole opens in a nearby park, and Rhea’s daughter Shelly falls inside. The search for Shelly brings a shocking accusation against the Wildes that spins out of control. Suddenly, it is one mom’s word against the other’s in a court of public opinion that can end only in blood. A riveting and ruthless portrayal of American suburbia, Good Neighbors excavates the perils and betrayals of motherhood and friendships and the dangerous clash between social hierarchy, childhood trauma, and fear.

Killing Neighbors

Author: Lee Ann Fujii
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457378
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

The Deadly Neighbors

Author: Merry Jones
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312356217
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Book Description
A taut, fast-paced suspense novel in the tradition of Mary Higgins Clark, The Deadly Neighbors again features the tension-packed storytelling of the talented Merry Jones. In this third novel featuring art therapist Zoe Hayes, the neighbors are shocked when a woman’s body is discovered in the kitchen of Zoe’s estranged father, Walter. In fact, they suspect Walter of killing her. But as Zoe investigates further, it seems that the neighbors are up to some pretty shocking shenanigans themselves. As Zoe tries to prove her father’s innocence, she encounters a cruel ring of organized criminals who specialize in dark and deadly forms of entertainment. Trying to escape their grasp, Zoe---with her daughter, Molly, in tow---must solve a series of grisly murders, but in the process, stumbles into secrets that force her to reconnect with a lost and very frightening part of her own past.

A Question of Intent

Author: Jennifer M. Neighbors
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900433016X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
In A Question of Intent: Homicide Law and Criminal Justice in Qing and Republican China, Jennifer M. Neighbors uses legal cases from the local, provincial and central levels to explore both the complexity with which Qing law addressed abstract concepts and the process of adoption, adaptation, and resistance as late imperial law gave way to criminal law of the Republican period. This study reveals a Chinese justice system, both before and after 1911, that defies assignment to binary categories of modern and pre-modern law that have influenced much of past scholarship.

Producing Spoilers

Author: Joyce Dalsheim
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199944431
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Book Description
Supporters of Hamas and radical religious Israeli settlers seem to serve one purpose in the international peace process: to provide an excuse for its failure. High-level diplomatic negotiators and grassroots peace activists alike blame religious extremists for acting as "spoilers" of rational negotiation, and have often attempted to neutralize, co-opt, or marginalize them. In Producing Spoilers, Joyce Dalsheim explores the problem of stalled peacemaking by viewing spoilers not as the cause, but as a symptom of systemic malfunctions within the concept of the nation-state itself, and the secular constructs of historicism that support it. She argues that spoilers are generated as internal enemies in the course of conflict and used to explain why processes of peace and reconciliation fail. In other words, peacemaking efforts can work to produce enmity. Focusing on the case of Israel and Palestine, Dalsheim shows how processes of conflict resolution, diplomacy, dialogue, education, and social theorizing about liberation, peace, and social justice actually participate in constructing enemies, thus limiting the options for peaceful outcomes. Dalsheim examines the work of politicians and diplomats as well as scholars and grass-roots level peacemakers, drawing on her research and her own experience as an activist for peace. She identifies a number of common techniques and assumptions that help to produce spoilers, among them the constraints of the narrative form and how storytelling is employed in conflict resolution, and the idea of anachronism, which prevents theorists and activists from seeing creative possibilities for peaceful coexistence. Dalsheim also looks at the limits of territorial solutions and the consequences of nationalism-the context in which spoilers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are produced. She contrasts that nationalism with current theorizing on flexible citizenship and diasporic identity. The book culminates by moving beyond national enmity and outside conventional peacemaking to clear a space in which to think about alternative forms of negotiation, exchange, community, and coexistence.