Scheca02's List: Final Project

• Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world.

  • Basic definition. But note the point that it is about "interaction and integration among peoples, companies, and governments of differing nation-states."
• Globalization is not new, though. For thousands of years, people—and, later, corporations—have been buying from and selling to each other in lands at great distances, such as through the famed Silk Road across Central Asia that connected China and Europe during the Middle Ages. Likewise, for centuries, people and corporations have invested in enterprises in other countries. In fact, many of the features of the current wave of globalization are similar to those prevailing before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

  • Go into some historically context. French imperialism in Africa leading to a lot of today's global interactions within the continent. 
• Technology has been the other principal driver of globalization. Advances in information technology, in particular, have dramatically transformed economic life. Information technologies have given all sorts of individual economic actors—consumers, investors, businesses—valuable new tools for identifying and pursuing economic opportunities, including faster and more informed analyses of economic trends around the world, easy transfers of assets, and collaboration with far-flung partners.

  • Also note that particular technologies such as the cargo ship, phones, and wireless/satielle tech is some of the most important in terms of "connecting" the world. However, also go back and look at GS article about how we arn't really that well connected. 

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• "Glocalization" is an historical process whereby localities   develop direct economic and cultural relationships to the global system   through information technologies, bypassing and subverting traditional   power hierarchies like national governments and markets.
• a subjugated "local"   realm where the identity-affirming senses of place, neighborhood, town,   locale, ethnicity, etc. survive (if just barely) against the global onslaught   of global capitalism, media, and network identities.
• Culture has become a much more mobile, human software   employed to mix elements from diverse contexts. With cultural forms and   practices more separate from geographic, institutional, and ascriptive   embeddenness, we are witnessing what Jan Nederveen Pieterse refers to   as postmodern 'hybridization.'" (Wayne Gabardi, Negotiating Postmodernism,   33-34)
• Friedman defines glocalization as "the ability of a culture,   when it encounters other strong cultures, to absorb influences that   naturally fit into and can enrich that culture, to resist those things   that are truly alien and to compartmentalize those things that, while   different, can nevertheless be enjoyed and celebrated as different."
• Bad glocalization is when she gets off a plane   in Los Angeles and is surprised that "they have McDonalds in America,   too!" The little girl should be aware that McDonalds is not a part   of the Japanese culture. Otherwise we are headed for a very bland world

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• Rwanda’s population of more than 7 million people is divided into three ethnic groups: the Hutu (who made up roughly 85% of the population), the Tutsi (14%) and the Twa (1%).
• The former colonial power, Germany, lost possession of Rwanda during the First World War and the territory was then placed under Belgian administration. In the late 1950’s during the great wave of decolonization, tensions increased in Rwanda. The Hutu political movement, which stood to gain from majority rule, was gaining momentum while segments of the Tutsi establishment resisted democratization and the loss of their acquired privileges. In November 1959, a violent incident sparked a Hutu uprising in which hundreds of Tutsi were killed and thousands displaced and forced to flee to neighboring countries.

  • Historical context. Important to remember that firstly Rwanada was under Germany control and later Belgian. Look deeper into the process of decolonization in Rwanada
• This marked the start of the so- called ‘Hutu Peasant Revolution’ or ‘social revolution’ lasting from 1959 to 1961, which signified the end of Tutsi domination and the sharpening of ethnic tensions. By 1962, when Rwanda gained independence, 120,000 people, primarily Tutsis, had taken refuge in neighboring states to escape the violence which had accompanied the gradual coming into power of the Hutu community.

  • Revolution and independence. Hutu control
• A new cycle of ethnic conflict and violence continued after independence. Tutsi refugees in Tanzania and Zaire seeking to regain their former positions in Rwanda began organizing and staging attacks on Hutu targets and the Hutu government.
• In 1988, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was founded in Kampala, Uganda as a political and military movement with the stated aims of securing repatriation of Rwandans in exile and reforming of the Rwandan government, including political power sharing. The RPF was composed mainly of Tutsi exiles in Uganda, many of whom had served in President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army, which had overthrown the previous Ugandan government in 1986. While the ranks of the RPF did include some Hutus, the majority, particularly those in leadership positions, were Tutsi refugees.
• On 6 April 1994, the deaths of the Presidents of Burundi and Rwanda in a plane crash caused by a rocket attack, ignited several weeks of intense and systematic massacres. The killings - as many as 1 million people are estimated to have perished - shocked the international community and were clearly acts of genocide. An estimated 150,000 to 250,000 women were also raped. Members of the presidential guard started killing Tutsi civilians in a section of Kigali near the airport. Less than half an hour after the plane crash, roadblocks manned by Hutu militiamen often assisted by gendarmerie (paramilitary police) or military personnel were set up to identify Tutsis.
• On 7 April, Radio Television Libres Des Mille Collines (RTLM) aired a broadcast attributing the plane crash to the RPF and a contingent of UN soldiers, as well as incitements to eliminate the "Tutsi cockroach". Later that day the Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana and 10 Belgian peacekeepers assigned to protect her were brutally murdered by Rwandan government soldiers in an attack on her home. Other moderate Hutu leaders were similarly assassinated.
• Government officials, soldiers and militia who had participated in the genocide fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), then known as Zaire, taking with them 1.4 million civilians, most of them Hutu who had been told that the RPF would kill them. Thousands died of water-borne diseases. The camps were also used by former Rwandan government soldiers to re-arm and stage invasions into Rwanda. The attacks were one of the factors leading to the war between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo that took place in 1996. Former Rwandan forces continue to operate in the DRC alongside Congolese militia and other armed groups. They continue to target civilian populations and cause deaths, injury and harm.

  • How did the rest of the world help with the aftermath?
• The Rwandan government began the long-awaited genocide trials at the end of 1996. The delay was due to the fact that the country had lost most of its judicial personnel, not to mention the destruction to courts, jails and other infrastructure. By 2000, there were over 100,000 genocide suspects awaiting trial.

  • Where there any international trails? 
• At the international level, the Security Council on 8 November 1994 set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, currently based in Arusha, Tanzania. Investigations began in May 1995. The first suspects were brought to the court in May 1996 and the first case began in January 1997. The UN Tribunal has jurisdiction over all violations of international human rights that happened in Rwanda between January and December 1994. It has the capacity to prosecute high-level members of the government and armed forces that may have fled the country and would otherwise have gone unpunished. The court has since convicted the Prime Minister during the genocide Jean Kambanda, to life in prison. It was also the first international court to convict a suspect for rape as a crime against humanity and a crime of genocide. The court also tried three media owners accused of using their respective media to incite ethnic hatred and genocide. By April 2007, it had handed down twenty-seven judgments involving thirty-three accused.

  • UN's influence? How has that shaped current events?

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• "Independence through Civil Wars, 1956-2005."

  • South Sudan "gained" it's independence through a serious of civil wars. 1st 1955-1972. 2nd 1983-1989.
• The CPA established a six-year Interim Period, when a number of provisions were to be implemented to test the viability of a unified Sudan and to ensure that peace endured in the country. During the Interim Period, southern Sudan enjoyed a high degree of autonomy within a united Sudan. At the conclusion of the Interim Period, the people of southern Sudan voted in a referendum determining whether southern Sudan would secede from Sudan.
• "Comprehensive Peace Agreement and South Sudan Independence."

  • International interaction in the formation of South Sudan. 

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• In 1824, the settlement was named Monrovia, after the American president (and ACS member) James Monroe, and the <!-- #bbinclude ":liberia:glossary.pl" #TERM#="colony" --> colony <!-- end bbinclude --> became the Republic of Liberia. Over the next 40 years, 19,000 African American repatriates, sometimes known as Americo-Liberians, settled in Liberia, along with some 5,000 Africans recaptured from slave ships, and a small number of <!-- #bbinclude ":liberia:glossary.pl" #TERM#="West Indian" --> West Indian <!-- end bbinclude --> immigrants.

  • Introduction to the global market. 1st interaction with globalization.
• After Liberia declared its independence in 1847, Joseph J. Roberts, a freeborn Black who was born in the American state of Virginia, was elected Liberia's first president. It had taken fewer than 25 years for the Blacks from America to begin to govern their own, free country.
• Not surprisingly, England and France were the first countries to recognize Liberia's independence in 1848. Roberts and his senators, all American-born, resolved to create a country based on the principles of justice and equal rights.
   
   The settlers built schools and a university, and during the early years, agriculture, shipbuilding, and trade flourished. Yet as Liberia expanded its borders, a government of repatriates located largely on the coast attempted to establish control over a growing native population located largely in the interior. Over the next few decades, escalating economic difficulties began to weaken the state's dominance over the coastal indigenous population.

  • Liberia has had a long history of being closely tied to global world. How has this affected conflict?
• The brutal treatment they faced at the hands of the Liberian army drove some indigenous northerners across the border to the Ivory Coast. There, a man named Charles Taylor organized and trained many of them. Taylor had previously served as deputy minister of commerce under Doe, but was imprisoned for allegedly transferring millions of government funds into his own account. He was reported to have bribed his way out of a Massachusetts jail. When Taylor and his force of 100 rebels reentered Liberia in 1989, on Christmas Eve, thousands of Gio and Mano joined them. While they formed the core of his rebel army, there were many Liberians of other ethnic backgrounds who joined as well. A brutal <!-- #bbinclude ":liberia:glossary.pl" #TERM#="civil war" --> civil war <!-- end bbinclude --> ensued
•  

   <!-- end bbinclude --> In September 1990, Doe was captured and tortured to death by another rebel group originally associated with Taylor, while fighting between the rebels and the Liberian army escalated into civil war. Entire villages were emptied as people fled. Soldiers, some of them still children, committed unspeakable atrocities, raping and murdering people of all ages, in what became one of the world's worst episodes of <!-- #bbinclude ":liberia:glossary.pl" #TERM#="ethnic cleansing" --> ethnic cleansing 
• Five years later, at a conference sponsored by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the United Nations and the United States, the European Union, and the Organization of African Unity, Charles Taylor agreed to a <!-- #bbinclude ":liberia:glossary.pl" #TERM#="cease-fire" --> cease-fire <!-- end bbinclude --> and a timetable to demobilize and disarm his troops. In a climate hardly conducive to free movement and security of persons, he won a 1997 presidential election against 12 other candidates. Liberians had voted for him in the hope that he would end the bloodshed
• Today, the Liberian people are just beginning the slow process of recovering from the economic, social, political, and psychological trauma of the war. The world waits and watches to see if the cycle of clashes between different populations has truly been broken, and if Liberia can rebuild itself as a unified nation to achieve the promise of its star of liberty.

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