Final/Semi-Final Thoughts

I definitely bit off more than I could chew. I've been mucking about peacekeeping theory, international roles in theory and gained a bit of knowledge I didn't have, and I'm glad I did it. Overall though, it's far from my best paper in per capita quality. I would say I'm no closer to a definitive conclusion now than when I started. I feel like it's a step outside the walls or without training wheels or whatever that I haven't taken before. I said in class maybe a week ago that I feel like this was as much weathering a storm as a single bold step, meaning it's an ongoing steadily involving production more than an exertion of energy designed to go in one place. Or something. If I took six more weeks to work on this, I think I could have a 50% or so different paper, and could keep that going indefinitely.

Coalesence

Remembered to do a blog post this morning. Whippee!

Finalizing the process of transferring handwritten pages into a single body of text. I feel iffy about the prospect of this being work with a singular statement, but I'm realizing that this isn't really the point. I'm also trying to take a page from the books of most of the rest of the class, who seem to be relating their projects to something they actively want to be involved with. That wasn't how I started out, but I'm getting there.

I have more than 20 pages worth of material, I'm confident, but trimming it into a finished package is something I feel I'm behind on. One week to go, and I'd like to wrap a "what NGOs and other people can do" statement around everything. One of the things I'm learning (or re-learning; this seems to come up in plenty of walks of life) though is there's a major difference between immediate and angry passion about something and the kind of passion that inspires active dedication. I'm not sure whether the kind of action I'm writing as necessary is something I could spend a ton of my life doing. It's scary; I don't like to think that being involved with Africa and crimes against humanity is something akin to imagining myself as a football player when I was younger, but there's a pretty major bridge to cross to make a theory or idea something real, concrete.

Extreme Frustration

Reading "Aspects of Peacekeeping" by D.S. Gordon and F.H. Toase to get a sense of what guidelines armed forces representing the international community are given, and it's been of little help so far. behind in my work and feel that it needs to be pared back. I keep coming across the same vague statements in regard to what peacekeepers are authorized to do; it reinforces the impression that any kind of effective intervention in an ongoing conflict is up to individual countries.

The UN Security Council and peacekeeping forces are massive bureaucracies that do not have set procedures in place, so there isn't a substantive report I feel capable of giving on what can be changed besides more boldness in general, which is no kind of answer. I feel very negative about this project right now. The only things that seem important enough to write about in a composition are more or less facts transferred from books to a Word document with me rearranging the words. I understand that that is by and large what a research project is, but I feel stuck; every two sentences I have to halt and wait until I find a related bit of information that might not be coming for 100 pages or might be in an entirely different book. If I do it another way, I feel like I'm cherrypicking information.

Right now I'm still trying to get a foundation of historical data and international response protocols down so I can actually draw some conclusions about it and put together coherent thoughts. Last night I watched a documentary, "The Devil Came on Horseback" about the Sudan conflict and took like an hour-long walk. Essentially I want to capture the feeling that these situations are not just appallingly evil in the way that Nazism or Stalinism was; they're tragically frustrating because a defense capable of saving half a million lives in many cases would consist of something like the Alabama National Guard taking turns standing in shifts behind a makeshift fence, and cost something like what the government spends on employing meter maids. In other words, hundreds of thousands of people are not dying because they're within the grasp of an evil empire, they're dying because there's something like a line of 500 people who would all have to sign a sheet of paper agreeing to help. That's the idea I would like to get across and not have the paper come off as some shrill list of acronyms and numbers, but I feel like if anything I'm getting farther away from being able to convey that.

Arguments in Different formats

http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/bljonstewartcrossfire.htm Jon Stewart arguing with Tucker Carlson, video and transcript.

http://www.ushmm.org/genocide/analysis/details.php?content=2007-06-07 Sudan debate transcript and video.

http://www.slate.com/id/2203800/entry/2203801/ Republicans debating via e-mail what to do after most recent presidential election.

Thoughts After compiling planned bibliography

"...he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned. " -Jorge Luis Borges

Sweet merciful crap. This is a lot of theoretical reading I am going to do. Prof has said my topic is very broad and may need to be narrowed down. Among the works to be cited are I think 4 books that I will certainly not have time to read in their entirety (one I have read in part before, the Gourevitch book, and I know what I'm looking for in it, more or less).

Rwanda is more or less the germinating point of the ideas and thoughts behind this paper, and the Frontline "Ghosts of Rwanda" film is how my interest with it started. I think that fits into the multiliteracies trends we've been discussing in a big way. My entire life I've been someone always most easily reached by printed words and nothing else; something about the simplicity and plainness of it. I've read hundreds if not thousands of passages, fiction and non-fiction, that describe horrible things being done to people, and been affected by it. But there's a part of that film where a girl who has survived an Interahamwe assault is being treated.

She's looking at the camera the same way a kid does when he scrapes his knee and is trying to be brave and not cry but he knows you're watching and is embarrassed and tears just flood out, except of course her knee hasn't been scraped. She has a giant split on her head where someone tried to machete her but didn't use enough force to break the plates of the skull, only the skin. She's holding up a hand and all the fingers stop suddenly at the first knuckle, and flies are landing on her the way they would a dead person only she's still alive and looks right at you watching her. That hit me in a way that films about say the Holocaust, however realistic, simply don't, and even unflinching descriptions of warzones can't using only words. You can watch it online here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSJjfd4V2Mc&feature=PlayList&p=6660341BAE01BF62&index=10 that part starts at the 9 minute mark.

So Rwanda in 1994 is the starting point, the peak of interest. I don't want to leave it behind, but I also see that it cannot be the main focus if I want to write something besides a history paper (and I do). I intend still to stay with my plan of a project that has 5 parts with the greater focus on what has gone wrong in the past and what can be changed in the future, but I can certainly see that this would mean sacrificing depth in one topic for a wider scope. Need to focus on International Criminal Court and UN Security Council.

Input/Advice on what to focus on welcomed, anyone from class viewing this/facebook stalkers.

Tentative Planned Bibliography

Works Cited

Dallaire, Roméo. Shake hands with the devil the failure of humanity in Rwanda. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf, Distributed by Group West, 2005. Print.

"Ghosts of Rwanda." PBS, 2008. Web. .

Gourevitch, Philip. We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families stories from Rwanda. New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Distributed by Holtzbrinck, 2004. Print.

LeBor, Adam. "Complicity With Evil" The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide. New York: Yale UP, 2006. Print.

Michael, Barnett. Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda. Cornell UP, September 2003. Print.

Quigley, John B. The Genocide Convention An International Law Analysis (International and Comparative Criminal Justice) (International and Comparative Criminal Justice) ... and Comparative Criminal Justice). Grand Rapids: Ashgate, 2006. Print.

Sharamo, Roba. "The African Union's Peacekeeping Experience in Darfur, Sudan." Conflict Trends (2008): 50-55. The African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes. Web. .

Strauss, Scott. "Darfur and the Genocide Debate." JSTOR. 2005. Web. .

Weller, Marc. "Undoing the Global Constitution: UN Security Council Action on the International Criminal Court." JSTOR. 2002. Web. .

Wheeler, Nicholas. "Humanitarian Intervention in World Politics." CADAIR. Oxford University Press, 2008. Web. .

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