Social Science Research Council

Human Rights Reporting as the First Draft of the Indictment
Journalism has been described as the “first draft of history.” By the same token, the human rights report is the “first draft of the indictment.”
The genre of the human rights report shares much in common with legal documents such as indictments and court judgements. This [...]

Activist and Apologist: Contrasts and Parallels
This section uses techniques of textual and discourse analysis to examine two leading books on the Darfur crisis, identifying the strategies employed by the respective writers. One is by Prof. Eric Reeves the leading anti-genocide campaigner and the other is a defense of the Sudanese government by David Hoile. This [...]

The headline was, “A Tragedy Straight out of Shakespeare,” and the opening lines gripped my imagination and emotion. A student of literature wonders how their passion for the subject can be anything more that a personal, even selfish indulgence in a world scarred by genocide and starvation. But as a student of literature, I wanted to shout out, “Tragedy is not personal suffering and barbarism! Tragedy is a dramatic form!”

In this paper (spread over three postings) I argue that the human rights report is a tragic genre, but not in the classic sense of tragedy. Instead it portrays a Manichean world in which the human rights prosecutor is the protagonist of good against forces that are characterized, sometimes explicitly, as “evil.” Unlike classic tragedy, it is a genre that admits of no moral ambiguities, and therein lies at once its power and its weakness.