Hannibal Travis

Does browsing the world through a screen change a person, especially in the context of COVID-19? Recent studies indicate that self-care, psychological well-being, and empathy may suffer. The “Californian ideology” privileges expression of the self even as digital technology tends to interrupt the modern trend towards elaborating distinct selves via texts that convey knowledge. Meanwhile, digital browsing may be fracturing attention and empathy. As these changes proceed, legislators react to a medical and social crisis. Relaxation of business, community center, and school closures prevailed, under pressure from advocates of liberty, jobs, and pro-market economics. A rival set of regulatory reforms would prioritize fighting the virus and providing more relief to its victims as being forms of care for others. In the international domain, nationalist ideology and economic warfare intensify disparities in access to medical care, imported goods, and livelihoods. At stake is how best to take beings into care.

This article addresses a few moments in the evolution of human security law in Iraq, focusing in particular on the Coalition Provisional Authority, the new Iraqi Constitution, Iraqi High Tribunal (successor to the Iraqi Special Tribunal), and the International Criminal Court. It synthesizes the results of some existing research on ongoing impunity for certain crimes against political candidates, journalists, anti-corruption activists, and ethnic and religious minorities, a situation which may have tainted Iraq’s transition to a more democratic republic, while aggravating other conflicts, such as those in Syria. In theory, the institutions of human and national security can help reconcile peoples whose tenuous unity had been shattered in wartime. The sometimes competing priorities and policies of Iraqi politicians, civil society groups, and judges resulted in swift justice for Iraqi officials responsible for mass killings involving Shi’a Arab, Kurdish, and other victims, but a lack of justice for other segments of the population. The emphasis of some claims of injury over others may have "reenchanted" some sectors of Iraqi society with the state and its institutions, while alienating others and contributing to ruptures in the social fabric. The Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraqi leaders, and international community ensured that the high-profile proceedings against former regime officials would not be accompanied or followed by others that some Iraqis might perceive as being as pressing as those of the Iraqi High Tribunal, relating to the impact of sanctions and aerial bombardment, the legality of Iraq's occupation, torture, etc.

This paper will describe the drafting history of the Principles of the Law of Software Contracts, with particular attention to the extent of consumer and public-interest group representation in the process. The drafting process, I will argue, did not take adequate stock of problems identified in the late 1990s with proposed Article 2B of the Uniform Commercial Code, and then the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (“UCITA”), including provisions encouraging terms in violation of public policy, that constitute copyright or patent misuse by attempting to prohibit fair use or withdraw material from the public domain, or that are not properly disclosed before the purchase. The difference between the present situation and the 1990s, however, is the much greater importance today of European Community directives on the subject of consumer protection and electronic commerce, particularly given the explosion in e-commerce between the United States and Europe. This paper will analyze whether the Principles do enough to protect the interests of consumers and the public in four key areas: (1) consistency with U.S. federal and state statutory and common law, (2) clear and conspicuous disclosure of all relevant terms and conditions prior to the sale, (3) regulation and prevention of one-sided and unconscionable contract terms, and (4) consistency with European Community and domestic European law. My thesis is that the Principles and the comments thereto appear to sanction conduct that is in tension with the federal Copyright and Patent Acts, the common law of several U.S. states, and the European Community’s directives, especially those on the Legal Protection of Software Programs (1991), Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts (1993), and Protection of Consumers in Respect of Distance Contracts (1997). To that extent, the Principles seem to be an imperfect attempt to unify the law of software contracts, codify best practices, or develop the law in a desirable direction. Finally, the paper will discuss whether and when it is appropriate to harmonize U.S. and E.C. law and public policy

With an epic historical sweep, “Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq, and Sudan,” reveals how the struggles by nations and empires to establish their regional supremacy resulted in the destruction of families and human groups. This book presents a new theory of the meaning and scope of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, based on the drafting history, the case law of international criminal tribunals, and practice of the states parties to the convention since the 1950s. It then paints an expansive portrait of genocide against populations on all six inhabitable continents, with a special focus on the greater Middle East and North Africa since the nineteenth century. In the Ottoman Empire, the Interior Minister issued orders describing the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek subjects of the empire as saboteurs allied to Russia who needed to be deported from their homes, and led efforts to massacre entire cities, carry out systematic rapes, and impose famine and disease on the surviving remnants. Similarly, in 1980s Iraq the Revolutionary Command Council of the Ba’ath party issued orders that served as the basis of convictions for genocide and other crimes in the Iraqi High Tribunal. These orders declared that areas serving as a base of operations for Kurdish and pro-Iranian insurgents should be rendered devoid of all life. Finally, in the Darfur region of Sudan, as in southern Sudan before it, the President and Interior Minister issued orders to the army and allied militia to kill and drive out entire communities in regions seeking independence, autonomy, or simply political equality. This book also provides cause for hope, explaining how former dictators have been tried and convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, and how their victims have won independence and compensation for their losses after the fact in places like Armenia, Israel, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, northern Iraq, East Timor, and southern Sudan. What others are saying: “The comprehensive research is breath-takingly evident. This historical account of the lesser know genocidal conflicts is incredibly revealing. Perhaps the best thing one could say about this book is that the familiar adage—'Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it'—reverberates throughout this intensely engaging volume.” — ASIL UN21 Newsletter “This ambitious book in its research and coverage tells a sorry tale of mankind’s inhumanity and intolerance over millennia of genocidal deeds and rhetoric. A fast-moving narrative reaches from biblical times to Darfur, describing tragic events accompanied by selective quotations from their participants and observers. Genocide may be a recently invented term, but its occurrences based on a variety of causes and reasons seem to have been a deep part of the human experience of group interactions.” — Henry Steiner, Professor of Law, Emeritus, Harvard Law School, and co-author, International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics, Morals (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 3d ed. 2007) “In Genocide in the Middle East, Hannibal Travis breaks new ground in genocide studies by unveiling the full panoply of genocidal processes in the Middle East and West Asia as no previous scholar has. But he does much more: in terms of its twentieth and twenty-first-century coverage, this is simply the most expansive, detailed, and up-to-date history of genocide we possess.” — Adam Jones, Associate Professor, Political Science, University of British Columbia Okanagan, and author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006) "[T]he book seeks to present a comprehensive study of genocide.... Eyewitness accounts and diplomatic reports are effectively interwoven with other documentary evidence and academic research to produce a very thorough and disturbing portrait of this history." Mark Welton, Professor of International and Comparative Law, U.S. Military Academy, West Point

Genocide, Ethnonationalism, and the United Nations examines a series of related crises in human civilization growing out of conflicts between powerful states or empires and indigenous or stateless peoples. This is the first book to attempt to explore the causes of genocide and other mass killing by a detailed exploration of UN archives covering the period spanning from 1945 through 2011. Hannibal Travis argues that large states and empires disproportionately committed or facilitated genocide and other mass killings between 1945 and 2011. His research incorporates data concerning factors linked to the scale of mass killing, and recent findings in human rights, political science, and legal theory. Turning to potential solutions, he argues that the concept of genocide imagines a future system of global governance under which the nation-state itself is made subject to law. The United Nations, however, has deflected the possibility of such a cosmopolitical law. It selectively condemns genocide and has established an institutional structure that denies most peoples subjected to genocide of a realistic possibility of global justice, lacks a robust international criminal tribunal or UN army, and even encourages "security" cooperation among states that have proven to be destructive of peoples in the past. Questions raised include: What have been the causes of mass killing during the period since the United Nations Charter entered into force in 1945? How does mass killing spread across international borders, and what is the role of resource wealth, the arms trade, and external interference in this process? Have the United Nations or the International Criminal Court faced up to the problem of genocide and other forms of mass killing, as is their mandate?

This chapter critically examines the scholarly and political discourse since the 1960s on “the Armenian Genocide.” This discourse represents not only a forgetting or continued unawareness that there were Assyrian and Greek victims of the anti-Christian massacres of the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish republic, but an active suppression of our existing historical knowledge about Assyrian and Greek victims. There were between two and seven million Greeks and approximately 500,000 Assyrians living in the Ottoman Empire in 1914, but only about 258,000 Christians of all kinds remaining in Turkey by 1927, even though Turkey once included substantial Assyrian and Greek regions.5 Two potential explanations for the ongoing concealment of the Assyrian and Greek genocides are that there was little writing on Ottoman mass killing in general prior to the 1970s, or that recent scholarship made the Assyrian and Greek genocides prominent within genocide studies. Neither of them holds water, because there was abundant documentation of the Ottoman Christian genocide before the allegedly forgotten Armenian genocide began to be remembered, and very recent scholarly works minimize or completely ignore Assyrian and Greek victims.

This Article provides historical and legal support for the contention that the Sudanese government is guilty of genocide in southern Sudan, the Nuba mountains, and the Darfur region. Specifically, the government and the militias it sponsors have massacred civilians in these regions on a wide scale, starved and enslaved their inhabitants, committed widespread rape, burned hundreds or thousands of villages, and blocked humanitarian aid from reaching the victims in such a way as to ensure that mass deaths resulted. For these reasons, this Article disagrees with the 2005 report of the the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, submitted to the U.N. Secretary-General in early 2005 at the request of the U.N. Security Council, which concluded that the element of genocidal intent was missing because the government had not exterminated the entire population of Darfur. This Article applies the Genocide Convention, in light of the precedents established by national and international tribunals that have construed it over the years, to establish that genocide has occurred in Sudan because the Sudanese military and allied militia have killed and wounded many members of identifiable indigenous African groups by means of repeated and large-scale destructive and discriminatory acts. Genocidal intent may be inferred under such circumstances, as it was after the genocides in German-occupied Europe, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. This Article also attempts to account for the inadequate international response to genocide in Sudan by reference to the incentives of the Sudanese government and its allies and trading partners to drive indigenous African populations off their land in order to exploit the substantial oil deposits that have been opened to exploration by multinational corporations such as the China National Petroleum Corp. The proceeds of Sudanese oil sales enrich governments with seats on the Security Council, both directly through state-controlled oil companies and indirectly by growing their oil and arms industries. Multinational corporations and their respective governments have therefore armed the perpetrators of genocide in Sudan, and helped sustain an apathetic international response. After suffering from this dynamic for more than a decade, indigenous African leaders in Sudan, as well as international human rights advocates, have argued that Sudan's oil revenues represent a source of leverage over the government's genocidal policies. This Article argues that Sudan's oil revenues, and those of its multinational corporate partners, should be tapped to compensate Sudan's indigenous African populations for their human and material losses, and to secure for them a fair share of their country's natural resources. Such a compensatory approach to the problem of genocide in Sudan may also transcend some of the difficulties that genocide scholars have identified as inhibiting the effectiveness of international criminal prosecutions as deterrents to genocidal conduct, including the inadequacy of punishing a few token officials for the policies of an entire regime, including thousands of members of heavily-armed and well-organized army and militia units. The Article concludes by exploring different potential approaches to the question of how best to compensate victims of genocide and crimes against humanity in Sudan. One model is provided by the Darfur Peace Agreement, which calls for the government to pay $30 compensation to victims of genocide in Darfur. This amount, divided among the families of more than than 450,000 murdered Darfurians, is of course too paltry to be unacceptable to leaders of indigenous Africans in Sudan. For this reason, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, as well as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have argued that a more appropriate model may be provided by the U.N. Compensation Commission (UNCC), which levied reparations obligations directly against Iraq's oil exports as a result of its invasion and attempted annexation of Kuwait in 1990. The UNCC has already awarded more than $21.8 billion in reparations to Kuwaiti, Saudi, Jordanian, Palestinian, Israeli, and American corporations and citizens injured in their businesses or persons as a result of the war and related events. A similar commission for Sudan would actually be more justifiable than the UNCC was, among other reasons because millions, rather than a few thousand, civilians have been killed in Sudan. A third model looks to the multinational corporation that knowingly provide a genocidal government with the resources to carry out its policies, or that reward it for displacing civilians from resource-rich areas. This model is exemplified by the Second Circuit's recent opinion in Khulumani v. Barclay National Bank Ltd., 504 F.3d 254 (2d Cir. 2007), which held that oil corporations that aid and abet violations of customary international law may be sued for damages under the Alien Tort Claims Act if they they willingly supplied the means for a government to violate customary international law prohibitions against genocide or torture. The Article closes with the observation that genocide in Sudan and elsewhere is often motivated by the incentive of a dominant group to expropriate a foreign or minority population's land, natural resources, property, and uncompensated labor. The restitution or redistribution of these resources stolen by governments and multinational corporations may deter genocide as an instrument of public policy by making it less profitable, and, more importantly, provide some means for populations driven from their ancestral homes and lands to survive. In Sudan and eastern Chad, where displaced civilians have sometimes been reduced to eating tree bark and drinking fetid water to stay alive, the question of compensation as a human rights and human security measure could not be more urgent.

This Essay explores postmodern censorship of pacifist expression. Postmodern censorship is distinguishable from its pre-modern or modern counterparts by its immaterial, seemingly nonviolent ways of watching and influencing of apparently private activity, rather than by using material violence as an ostentatious tyrant would. While still sculpting citizens’ beliefs and behaviors, postmodern power applies itself to private technologies and the enjoyment of what seems to be leisure time or tools such as television or radio. Postmodern regulation directs itself at privatized implementation of governmental objectives, including the lies and crimes of governments. It simulates real events in spectacles of illusion and artifice. In the postmodern era, everything is increasingly artificial, real events are excluded from the public spectacle, and the meaning of words and concepts is lost.