The Key to My Neighbor's House

Examining competing notions of justice in Bosnia and Rwanda, award-winning Boston Globe correspondent Elizabeth Neuffer convinces readers that crimes against humanity cannot be resolved by talk of forgiveness, or through the more common recourse to forgetfulness.

As genocidal warfare engulfed the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the international community acted too late to prevent unconscionable violations of human rights in both countries. As these states now attempt to reconstruct their national identities, the surviving victims of genocide struggle to come to terms with a world unhinged.

Interviewing victims and aggressors, war orphans and war criminals, Serbian militiamen and NATO commanders, Neuffer explores the extent to which genocide erodes a nation’s social and political environment, just as it destroys the individual lives of the aggressor’s perceived enemies. She argues persuasively that only by achieving justice for these people can domestic and international organizations hope to achieve lasting peace in regions destroyed by fratricidal warfare.