Criminal trials are fundamentally about individual accountability whereas truth commissions are less about the guilt of the perpetrator and more about the suffering of the victim. A criminal trial is only incidentally a therapeutic or cathartic process for victims. But… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
I hate the tribal hatred thesis - in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and places like that they kill each other because that's just what people do there. I think it's profoundly ignorant. I was astonished when Samuel Huntington wrote his famous clash of civilizations essay in response to the Yugoslavian war. I was on the streets in Sarajevo and every other… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share
Helping survivors of residential schools in Canada is not the same as the UN sending in peacekeepers to prevent the genocide in Rwanda. But… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
We need to sacrifice something. And this is what I find lacking. We want to construct an image of ourselves as virtuous but we… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
The reason why the war ended in Bosnia was not because of amnesty but because a combined Croat-Bosnian offensive defeated the Serbs on the… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
Criminal trials are fundamentally about individual accountability whereas truth commissions are less about the guilt of the perpetrator and more about the suffering of… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
Storytelling is very important. It is through context and relations that we understand the importance of human dignity. The concept means nothing as an… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
“There can be no meaningful change if we choose to look down at the arena of anguish from thirty thousand feet.” — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
In Yugoslavia we were told we were not only naive idealists in wanting war criminals to be prosecuted but that we were actually standing… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
There are realities that one needs to deal with, but very often what we are told is political reality is merely cynicism. One could… — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
When we deconstruct how radical evil occurs we realize that it is anything but spontaneous combustion. You need pyromaniacs. — Payam Akhavan Copy Share Image
