In this article I argue that Ethiopian history reserves a privileged site for successive states as incontestable sites of knowledge, truth, legitimacy, and national identity. It shows how the state reconstructs memory of its past as total knowledge, and how the state utilizes this 'truth' of the past to command legitimacy. The state-authorized history has been packaged as a foundational knowledge for the nation, national identity, and raison d'être of state power. As much as Ethiopia's history has been always a totalizing narrative, the historians have also been strategically selective in reflecting the history of the militarily and politically dominant groups. Ethiopian history has been reductionist and history writing has been a state project. This study critically examines how the state's history as a metanarrative claims totality; and how everything else is silently subsumed under its totalized discourse. It excludes marginalized populations, ethnic and religious polities. As much as the state attempts to centralize every outlying domain around its power core, it simultaneously exteriorizes them through state discourses. Moreover, the paper suggests the need to challenge the state historiography, as the dominant unicentric narrative framework, with critical historiography.
In the "New World Order," Somalia is characterized as a deviant society, especially by Western countries. This characterization is magnified by focusing upon armed conflicts among different groups in Somalia and is marked by a neglect of global forces and history, including indigenous perspectives.The benchmark for judging the nature and scale of such crises is the condition of statelessness, measured by the absence of a central political authority and the modem claim of an ostensible universal rule of law. However, the attempted replacement of sacred places and kinship identities of indigenous peoples with the identity of the New World Order that emphasizes self-interested and self-maximizing individuals, i.e., Western individualism, has led not to a melting pot, but a boiling pot. The Somalis, as with many other ethnic and indigenous groups throughout the world, do not find a meaningful sense of life by being defined as modem individuals via the state. Any viable alternative to disentangling Somalia and similar indigenous peoples from current and future crises might benefit from recognition and accomodation to their traditional ways of life and systems of governance. Moreover, future work should include explications of the impact of global hegemony, the increasing role of the United Nations in advancing foreign policy, military interventions under the facade of peacekeeping, and the acceleration of a market economy ostensibly directed by global forces such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Victimization is a person's direct or indirect experience of physical, emotional, and psychological harm or loss of life or property in the hands of an offender. Victimization has become, particularly since the mid‐1980s, a momentous issue and a focal concern at the international, regional, and national level. Hence, the protection and fair treatment of victims and respect for their rights have increasingly gained global attention within the last two decades. In view of this, the need has arisen to establish standardized and uniform international guidelines on victimization; the United Nations (UN) and its agencies have spearheaded this global cause, with the cooperation of member states, nongovernmental advocacy groups, humanitarian organizations, community activists, and academic institutions. On November 29, 1985, the UN General Assembly issued a Declaration on basic principles of justice for victims of crime and abuse of power. This was the first step toward the universal recognition of victims of crime as well as victims of abuse of power.
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