Documentation & Denial: The Fight to Expose Mass Atrocities

Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya poured across the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh in late 2017, fleeing death at the hands of Myanmar's military. But even as humanitarian workers described the abuses the refugees had suffered as "among the worst we've ever seen", Myanmar's government dismissed all allegations as "fabricated news". Myanmar's denials on the world stage were accompanied at home by the prosecution and imprisonment of journalists investigating the military, and even more ominously, by targeted killings of Rohingya carrying smartphones that could be used to document massacres.

Mass atrocities are a devastatingly common feature of the international system. But although it is clear that perpetrators exploit the international community's reluctance to intervene, we do not have a clear understanding of the role that strategic contestation over information plays in facilitating the commission of atrocities and encouraging international inaction. This project's aim is to develop an account of how mass atrocities become public knowledge by examining victims' efforts to expose abuses and powerful perpetrators' attempts to conceal them.

The project will analyze the micro-dynamics of contestation between victims and perpetrators over evidence of atrocities. To build a full account of how these struggles play out, it will:

1. perform content analysis of perpetrators' denials of atrocities and conduct semi-structured interviews of Western foreign policy officials in order to develop an understanding of how atrocity perpetrators use rhetoric to protect themselves from international interference;

2. employ a deeply embedded approach to field research with Sri Lankan Tamil and Burmese Rohingya activists on the ground and in the diaspora in order to construct a picture of how victims document atrocities; and

3. conduct a network analysis of advocacy communities in the two case studies in order to map and analyze the pathways by which evidence of atrocities travels to international audiences.

This project will contribute meaningfully to academic literatures on human rights activism, repressive state behavior, and international cooperation and the obstacles thereto, but it will also intervene in policy debates on preventing and punishing mass atrocities and offer practical guidance to activists all over the world fighting to end atrocities. The findings of this research have the potential to benefit some of the most vulnerable populations in the world's most fragile and conflict-affected states by improving the chances that mass atrocities are prevented and punished.