Wahutu Siguru Presents: “When is it a Genocide?”
Wahutu Siguru discusses the questions:
- When is an atrocity considered to be a genocide?
- Who makes the decision to label it a genocide?
- What does labeling an on-going atrocity a genocide mean for those that are on-going but are not considered as genocidal?
This presentation seeks to interrogate these questions by looking at how Rwanda and Darfur were framed by both the U.S. State Department and media organizations in African countries. It asks us to grapple with the changing meaning of to the term genocide between these two atrocities whilst reflecting the usefulness of the term in raises awareness.
Wahutu Siguru is the 2013-2014 and the 2015 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology department at The University of Minnesota. His current research focuses on how Africa’s Media framed Darfur between 2003 and 2008 and compares this to how media from the global north compared Darfur in the same period. He also has a monthly blog contribution titled ‘eye on Africa’, which focuses on news on conflict in Africa, that appears in the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies website blog.
