East Pakistan Genocide Research Paper

The cry for help during the Bangladesh Genocide in 1971, conducted by West Pakistan under Yahya Khan, failed to bring together the international community to act on their morals. The genocide resulted in Bangladesh emerging as a sovereign nation South Asia. This paper will refer to ‘Bangladesh’ as East Pakistan, as the conflict occurred prior to East Pakistan’s independence. The genocide was an attempt to suppress Bengali nationalists in the provincial wing of East Pakistan, who fought for their independence. With an estimated casualty of 3 million, this genocide was a ground-breaking case for attention, as the international norm of human rights and genocide was already internalized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Genocide Convention in 1948. An international norm is a “standard[s] of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity”, and ‘the norm’ this paper with constantly refer to is the international norm of human rights and genocide. Obligations of this norm included the intervention and prevention of genocide by the signatory states. To understand the why the international community failed to conform to the norm and prevent the genocide, …show more content…
Disagreement between scholars, who can be considered entrepreneurs of norms, failed to act as the force that persuades a mass of states to adopt a norm. However, in this case, as the norm was already internalized as the standard of appropriateness, scholars, as entrepreneurs, failed to sway states to practice the institutionalized international norm. Although atrocities in East Pakistan received extensive media coverage, there was a lack of “scholarly interest in the question of genocide”. Indicating that media coverage is not enough, the significance of the pressure from these academics to influence political actors are

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