Principal speaker
Maartje Weerdesteijn
At the 2005 World Summit, the international community accepted the responsibility to “help to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”. These crimes are most likely to occur in non-democratic regimes, where the leader planned and instigated the crimes and often legitimized them in accordance with a particular ideology. Considering the important role that the dictator plays in the perpetration of the crimes, the idea is put forward that his personality and rationality are important to assess whether the crimes can actually be stopped. His responsiveness partly determines whether foreign policy measures targeted at mitigating or stopping the commission of these gross human rights violations will be successful. Through a comparative case study of Pol Pot and Milosevic it is argued that ideological leaders are less responsive than non-ideological leaders to foreign policy measures targeted to stop or mitigate the occurrence of international crimes. While Milosevic used ideology to create a climate in which international crimes could be perpetrated in order to garner further power and prestige, Pol Pot was motivated by his ideological zeal. In Weber’s terminology Milosevic was guided by instrumental rationality while Pol Pot acted on the basis of value rationality. Ideology often causes the ultimate goal to be looked upon as sacred and does not allow for compromise and, according to Weber, value rational leaders are therefore no longer concerned with the consequences of their actions. This causes the value rational leader to become less responsive to foreign policy measures from third countries and the international community. The comparative case study compares two crucial moments; NATO’s bombing of Serbia when the crisis in Kosovo escalated and Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia, to analyse the responsiveness of the two leaders to the most extreme form of pressure, the threat of military intervention.
Maartje Weerdesteijn is a PhD candidate at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She holds a BSc European Studies (Cum Laude) from Maastricht University and an MSc (Cum Laude) from VU University Amsterdam in International Criminology. Before becoming a PhD candidate, she worked for three years as a lecturer in the master International Crimes and Criminology at VU University Amsterdam. She published before on the normalization of violence in Serbia in the 1990s, and is currently working on a comparative case study of Zambia and Zimbabwe with Stephen McLoughlin.
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