Payam Akhavan

We must sacrifice something in order to make the world better.

— Payam Akhavan

“There can be no meaningful change if we choose to look down at the arena of anguish from thirty thousand feet.”

— Payam Akhavan

Wounds simply won't heal if they are swept under the carpet.

— Payam Akhavan

The reason why the war ended in Bosnia was not because of amnesty but because a combined Croat-Bosnian offensive defeated the Serbs…

— Payam Akhavan

There are realities that one needs to deal with, but very often what we are told is political reality is merely cynicism.…

— Payam Akhavan

When we deconstruct how radical evil occurs we realize that it is anything but spontaneous combustion. You need pyromaniacs.

— Payam Akhavan

In many instances violence - which obviously inflicts tremendous trauma on victims - also inflicts trauma on the perpetrator. Radical evil takes…

— Payam Akhavan

When I joined the UN War Crimes Tribunal, it was a realization of the dream of justice, that finally after Nuremberg, the…

— Payam Akhavan

Helping survivors of residential schools in Canada is not the same as the UN sending in peacekeepers to prevent the genocide in…

— Payam Akhavan

We need to sacrifice something. And this is what I find lacking. We want to construct an image of ourselves as virtuous…

— Payam Akhavan

Criminal trials are fundamentally about individual accountability whereas truth commissions are less about the guilt of the perpetrator and more about the…

— Payam Akhavan

In Yugoslavia we were told we were not only naive idealists in wanting war criminals to be prosecuted but that we were…

— Payam Akhavan

I hate the tribal hatred thesis - in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and places like that they kill each other because that's just…

— Payam Akhavan

Storytelling is very important. It is through context and relations that we understand the importance of human dignity. The concept means nothing…

— Payam Akhavan