Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work.
The now-famous quote included by New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza in an article that described President Obama’s foreign policy as “leading from behind” provoked more of a stir this week when the National Security Council spokesman denied the comment originated in the White House. Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin covers the controversy.
Summarizing the findings of a new study from Georgetown about the social activism behaviors, Katya Andresen writes about “Why Slacktivism is Underrated” for Mashable.
Launching a series about conflict minerals due diligence on his blog The Laws of Rule, lawyer and analyst Mark Taylor explains in Part I why the expectations that companies will start tracing their supply chain for minerals is entirely fair. Taylor writes:
The argument about complexity is both a genuine concern and entirely solvable. It is a genuine concern because every industry facing consumer and regulatory demands for ethically cleaner production processes has to adapt due diligence methods to meet the specific characteristics of their value chain. Other industries have done so with respect to anti-bribery regulations and there are an increasing number which are doing so to deal with the ethical challenges posed by global supply chains, including numerous institutional investors, leading supply chain monitoring efforts such as the Fair Labor Association, and the entire ethical and green trading movement.
Amid questions about how Col. Muammar Qaddafi actually died, after videos showed the former Libyan leader injured by alive, David Rieff writing in Foreign Policy suggests that Western governments—in spite of calls for due process—are “breathing a sigh of relief” that they won’t have to watch Qaddafi take the stand at the ICC. He writes:
Imagine the stir he would have made in The Hague. There, along with any number of fantasies and false accusations, he would almost certainly have revealed the extent of his intimate relations with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the details of his government's collaboration with Western intelligence services in counterterrorism, with the European Union in limiting migration from Libyan shores, and in the granting of major contracts to big Western oil and construction firms.
Writing for The Atlantic, Micah Zenko considers both the stated and the pragmatic reasons for the Kenyan military operation in Somalia. And a personality Sudan advocates know well makes an appearance, adding some intrigue over the role of the United States in the current offensive.