When we deconstruct how radical evil occurs we realize that it is anything but spontaneous combustion. You need pyromaniacs.

- Payam Akhavan

There are realities that one needs to deal with, but very often what we are told is political reality is merely cynicism. One could equally say that …

- Payam Akhavan

When I joined the UN War Crimes Tribunal, it was a realization of the dream of justice, that finally after Nuremberg, the UN is going to put the accu…

- Payam Akhavan

In Yugoslavia we were told we were not only naive idealists in wanting war criminals to be prosecuted but that we were actually standing in the way o…

- Payam Akhavan

Storytelling is very important. It is through context and relations that we understand the importance of human dignity. The concept means nothing as …

- Payam Akhavan

Helping survivors of residential schools in Canada is not the same as the UN sending in peacekeepers to prevent the genocide in Rwanda. But both are …

- Payam Akhavan

Criminal trials are fundamentally about individual accountability whereas truth commissions are less about the guilt of the perpetrator and more abou…

- Payam Akhavan

We need to sacrifice something. And this is what I find lacking. We want to construct an image of ourselves as virtuous but we don't want to suffer f…

- Payam Akhavan

The reason why the war ended in Bosnia was not because of amnesty but because a combined Croat-Bosnian offensive defeated the Serbs on the battlefiel…

- Payam Akhavan