Documentation & Denial: The Fight to Expose Mass Atrocities

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 will develop an account of how mass atrocities become public knowledge by analyzing the micro-dynamics of contestation between victims and perpetrators over evidence of mass atrocities, using a combination of software-assisted content and network analysis, elite interviews, and ethnographic field research.

The project has three key aims:

1. to develop an understanding of how atrocity perpetrators use rhetoric to protect themselves from international interference;
2. to construct a picture of how victims document atrocities against them when perpetrators are suppressing evidence; and
3. to identify the pathways by which evidence of atrocities travels to international audiences and becomes public knowledge.

The project will use software-assisted content analysis to build a novel dataset of atrocity perpetrators' public statements along with elite interviews, ethnographic field research, and network analysis to construct detailed case studies of the Burmese attack on the Rohingya minority and Sri Lankan war crimes committed against Tamil civilians in order to analyze the micro-dynamics of contestation between victims and perpetrators over evidence of mass atrocities.

To build a full account of how these struggles play out, the project 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; Page 2 of 7 Date Saved: 26/03/2020 14:25:47 Date Printed: 27/03/2020 13:50:29
2. employ a deeply-embedded approach to qualitative 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 against them when perpetrators are suppressing evidence; and
3. conduct a network analysis of atrocity advocacy communities in the two case studies in order to map and analyze the pathways by which evidence of atrocities travels to international audiences and becomes public knowledge.

This project will not only contribute to academic literatures on human rights and political violence, it will also engage pressing policy debates on preventing and punishing mass atrocities, and offer practical guidance to activists all over the world fighting for accountability.

The project will use software-assisted content analysis to build a novel dataset of atrocity perpetrators' public statements along with elite interviews, ethnographic field research, and network analysis to construct detailed case studies of the Burmese attack on the Rohingya minority and Sri Lankan war crimes committed against Tamil civilians in order to analyze the micro-dynamics of contestation between victims and perpetrators over evidence of mass atrocities.

• Grant title: Documentation & Denial: The Fight to Expose Mass Atrocities
• Start date: 01/05/21
• End date: 30/04/24
• Sponsor: New Investigator Award
• Principal investigator: Dr Kate Cronin-Furman