Human Rights Archive

International conflict management is not necessarily a rewarding occupation for people who have neat and orderly minds. Well-made plans tend to fall apart in fast-moving crises. As I noted in a chapter in a book on the Security Council published earlier this year, the recent history of United Nations peace operations is basically a story of “one damn thing after another.” U.N. forces have repeatedly been caught off-guard by upsurges in violence and entangled in intractable struggles that they can help mitigate but cannot resolve. This is not only true for the blue helmets. In the United States, analysts once […]

In June 2014, a video released by FUNAI, the Portuguese acronym for Brazil’s Department for Indian Affairs, captures the moment seven members of an unnamed, previously uncontacted tribe from the Amazon rainforest made their first voluntary contact with the modern world. The video shows the men emerging naked from the forest onto the banks of the River Envira in the western Brazilian state of Acre, close to the Peruvian border. After calling out, singing and signaling with their hands, they crossed the river to a small indigenous settlement of the local Ashaninka people on the other side. The men told […]

On Nov. 8, an estimated 30 million people took part in Myanmar’s first free national election in a quarter-century. From the shores of the Andaman Sea to the Himalayan uplands, many lined up in the pre-dawn gloom before voting stations officially opened at 6 a.m. Vying for citizens’ votes across some 1,171 constituencies were 6,189 candidates from a total of 93 parties. For most voters, however, it came down to two. On one side was the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), the drab political proxy of the powerful Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, which has ruled the country for more […]

In June 2014, headlines sounded the alarm over an influx of unaccompanied minors clandestinely entering the U.S. from Central America. While the story has largely receded from view, the crisis continues. In recent years, more than 100,000 Central American children have undertaken the perilous 3,000-mile journey to the United States, exposing themselves to extortion, kidnapping, rape and murder along the way. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 68,000 unaccompanied minors, ranging in ages from less than 1 to 17 years old, were apprehended at the Southwest border between October 2013 and September 2014. Among them were more […]

Last week, the Israeli national security agency Shin Bet announced a series of arrests of extremist Israeli settlers suspected in the July arson attack that killed a Palestinian family of three in the West Bank village of Duma. The grisly incident, in which radicals from illegal Israeli settlements set a home on fire, leaving an 18-month-old boy to burn to death, brought settler violence to the fore. Although the Duma attack renewed concerns over settlement expansion and the violence it brings, such episodes are not new. As far back as 2008, settlers coined the term “price tag” to describe acts […]