The Architecture of Forgetting: Namibia and the Administration of Grief

The international moral order does not fail victims of genocide.

This is the uncomfortable proposition that a century of evidence demands we consider.

It was not built to serve them.

It was built to serve the people who built it, and in this, with remarkable consistency, it succeeds.

This is not cynicism.

Cynicism is lazy and explains nothing.

This is a structural observation and it requires a structural argument.

I write from Namibia.

That location is not incidental.

It is the epistemological ground of the argument.

The law I live inside was not written for me.

I know this.