Conflict Cafe: Pedro Rosa Mendes

Monday 17 February, 14.00-15.00, NTC.3.02

Speaker: Pedro Rosa Mendes, Visiting Fellow at University of Essex from the Graduate Institute in Geneva

The Conflict Café is lucky to have Pedro Rosa Mendes to kick start our discussion with a short presentation on the following:

For a long while, from the years of decolonization and liberation struggles in the 1950s well into the end of the century, armed resistance and insurgency often carried a strong narrative of legal, political and moral legitimacy and credibility. Media and academic discourse had an important role on shaping and sustaining public perceptions of “a just cause”, lending their own credibility (based on structured critical thinking, ground-breaking evidence and often adversarial reporting) to non-state actors that disputed the primacy of the State through violent means and methods (from Latin America to Southeast Asia, from Sudan to Kosovo). The works and lives of Basil Davidson and Ryszard Kapuscinski, for instance, come to mind as representing well those times.

Post 9/11, the war on terror seems to have all but erased the possibility of any moral high-hand of armed insurgency, reversing somehow the terms of the equation: any violent dispute of the role of the State is inevitably approached through the lens of “terrorism” and the discourse of “counterinsurgency”. Current conflict reporting mediates global and international legal and moral frameworks in a substantially different footing from, say, two generations ago. Think for instance of the strong political, ethical and moral thread behind the publication and the legal battle behind the Pentagon Papers, in conditions unthinkable today.

Hence the question: are there true conditions today for an informed coverage of (armed) insurgencies? Or is it that in-depth/quality “conflict reporting” from behind the NIAC curtain got fatally infected by an overall “anti-terror” bias? Is this a function of how we reshaped the way we think of insurgencies as inherently unjust and potentially unlawful? Or is it all about a change in threshold: the burden of legitimacy, which fell strongly towards the States before, is now a heavier burden on insurgents to make their business case through media.

Pedro Rosa Mendes is doing LLM-IHL at Essex School of Law and he is currently a Visiting Fellow with the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Pedro was a conflict and investigative reporter for many years, publishing reportage and research on (mostly) non-international armed conflicts and insurgencies in West and Southern Africa, the Western Balkans and Southeast Asia, including in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Lone, Liberia, former Zaire, Timor-Leste and Libya. Over the last decade, Pedro has been working in peace, security and development with different organizations, more recently with UNHCR´s Division of Resilience and Solutions. Among other titles, he published “Schwarz.Licht: Passagen durch Westafrika” (Brandes und Apsel), “Bay of Tigers” (Granta UK) and “Pension des Mondes Perdus” (Ed. Metailié).

All Welcome.