Genocide And The Global Village Chapter Summary

Genocide and the Global Village by Kenneth J. Campbell

Upfront Campbell is honest about his motives for writing the book, he is against genocide and he is partial towards the victims and against the perpetrators . As outlined in his introduction the book is a result of years of research and study of contemporary genocide. His goal for the book is to address the problems encountered when trying to stop genocide and try to come to an understanding on why there is insufficient political will to employ military force in order to stop and prevent genocide.

Quite a few questions are raised in Campbell’s introduction, as a build up for the book, but his arguments are centered on debates inside the US military force and has often little to do with

He does claim that when a state commits genocide it forfeits its rights to sovereignty. Additionally, he believes that the international community, especially the US, is has a responsibility to act to prevent it. That is also what he believe is why they are reluctant to use the term genocide. He describes genocide as the worst way human rights can be broken, and he believes that it is in the U.S. interest to identify and prevent Genocide because it is bad for business. Genocide also creates mass refugee flows which can be hard to deal with, in terms of getting them to a secure place and giving them a

That the Serbs carried out an ethnic cleansing against Bosnians and Albanians was well known, but it is rather unclear whether there was a clear genocidal intent. The U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide reads: genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group […] . The Serbian perpetrator did carry out their cleansing but their aims were to drive the Bosnians and Albanians off the land their claimed as their own. Whether or not there was an intent to destroy the groups or deny their existence remains unknown. Of course one could speculate whether or not their intent to remove them from their land could be seen as an intent to destroy their ethnicity, but such remains speculations. Campbell removes the speculation by arguing that ethnic cleaning is nothing more than a euphemism for genocide which again leaves room for him to present the case as such. In his study of the three cases he does rely on a broad definition of genocide, though by lowering the threshold for genocide he tries to make hard military decisions into easy