“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
—Mark Twain
Friday, July 17 was the annual World Day for International Criminal Justice, chosen to commemorate the adoption of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). This year, that commemoration was, at best, overshadowed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s pledge to “dismantle” the ICC just days before. Much has already been said about that pledge and the obvious flaws in Rubio’s disingenuously presented argument. I won’t recount them here. But I do want to address the undercurrent of fear and despair that has permeated the field, and why I think it’s premature.
Atrocity prevention is often conceptualized in the public eye as primarily an activity related to response and recovery, including humanitarian assistance, cease-fires and peace agreements, and, yes, criminal accountability for the worst offenses human beings can commit against each other. And those are important, even critical pieces of the work. I’ve been privileged, both in civil society and in my time as an Atrocity Prevention Policy Advisor at the US State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (no longer in existence following Rubio’s “reorganization”), to work on these aspects of the atrocity prevention portfolio. I supported human rights defenders, expert negotiators, local civil society actors, documenters and evidence-collection specialists, and lawyers in the worst conflicts around the world. We did what we could to make sure their efforts to end ongoing violence, document abuses and atrocities, and seek accountability and reparations for the victims and survivors could succeed.
But I would argue that my work on the part of the atrocity prevention portfolio least discussed was the most important work of my career. Because occasionally, just occasionally, we were able to try to do what it said on the tin and prevent mass atrocities. That work rarely looks like what most people imagine when they think of atrocity prevention, which makes it the hardest to justify. Frequently, that justification challenge is framed as a responsibility to show the causal link – that it’s impossible to prove the negative. Without going into the underlying philosophical and evidentiary problems with reducing atrocity prevention to a logical puzzle, suffice it to say that in several instances there is general agreement that real prevention took place. But I would also argue that the most successful prevention efforts benefited from being seen as unrelated to the “A-Word problem,” as we jokingly referred to the resistance in government to using “atrocity” to describe any situation not already in full-blown mass violence. Upstream atrocity prevention rarely overtly references atrocity risks. Many of the early warning indicators that identify weaknesses that can lead to mass atrocities can be addressed through development, education, economic empowerment, and institution-building.
Thankfully, even in an era of renewed great power competition, states still behave in ways that are generally, though not always, predictable. While a national interest-driven approach to atrocity prevention seems to frustrate the genocide prevention scholarship community, it leaves a narrow, if shrinking, window for continued atrocity prevention efforts, so long as we frame the need in the context of that national interest perspective.
Going back to the 2008 Genocide Prevention Task Force report, chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, it was clear that mass atrocities “fuel instability, usually in weak, undemocratic, and corrupt states. It is in these same types of states that we find terrorist recruitment and training, human trafficking, and civil strife, all of which have damaging spillover effects for the entire world.” That self-interested perspective is not a detriment to the field of atrocity prevention, so long as we treat it as an entrée into the state decision-making process, rather than a barrier to “pure” or “real” prevention efforts.
Take the much-maligned Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. On July 6, the UN General Assembly held the annual debate on the contentious doctrine, with interventions from 50 states and two regional organizations. The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, an NGO that works to align government and civil society commitments on the doctrine, has published an exhaustive review of the details of the various governmental engagements. The governments contributing to the debate were certainly divided on the value of R2P efforts. But the majority positively referenced the UN secretary-general’s 18th report on R2P, titled “Sustained implementation of the responsibility to protect at the national, regional and multilateral levels.”
The EU and numerous other nations also used this, even before Rubio’s catalyzing threat, as an opportunity to reaffirm their support for the ICC. Many also referenced the importance of domestic-first approaches, even as they called for international engagement when those efforts fail. Perhaps most interesting were the repeated references to the importance of supporting international law, especially in the current challenging context, and the need to address the growing inconsistent application of the R2P concept to ongoing mass atrocity issues.
I don’t bring in the R2P debate to try and show there’s no disagreement about atrocity prevention. Rather, I believe the ongoing and more robust disagreement about how to implement the principles of R2P, even in the current contentious global environment, is evidence of an opportunity to truly meet nations where they are in the post-American liberal order moment. National interest has become an even more critical guidepost in the new transactional international relations marketplace. And atrocity prevention efforts do not need to run away from that reality. Even as atrocity prevention proponents wrestle with how to operate in the greatly reduced foreign assistance and development spaces, there remain ways to show nations that the cost of mass atrocities and conflict in reduced future economic development, increased instability and violent extremism, and risks to domestic national security make preventing those atrocities a rational choice, even for a transactional actor.
It’s long past time we recognize that no actor on the international stage has “clean hands” when it comes to the question of mass atrocities. There continues to be a myth that some countries or peoples are more likely than others to commit mass violence. History tells us otherwise. Rather than bemoaning that lack of “purity,” or deprioritizing atrocity prevention in human rights efforts in light of the global retreat from development and humanitarian assistance budgets, now is the time to push for greater action in line with the national interest-driven foreign policy that many global actors seem to be adopting. By making the case that upstream prevention can serve that national interest, we position the field to be more effective in the current environment. Is it how I would wish we could grow this field? No, not at all. Is it an overdue recognition that Westphalian states have always acted in their own national interests, even when they dress those interests in the language of morality? Yes, I think so.
So rather than write the obituary for the ICC, international law, or the field of atrocity prevention generally, let’s take a page from Mark Twain. Years after his reported death and his famous rejoinder to it, he changed his views on American expansionism, race, women’s suffrage, and imperialistic foreign policy. He kept fighting, even when his ideas were deemed “too controversial” to publish. Never did he let the rumor of his death be the actual end to his efforts. Neither should we.
D. Wes Rist is deputy executive director of the Mass Atrocities Prevention Program and a PhD student at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. He previously served as an atrocity prevention policy advisor in the US State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and as deputy executive director of the American Society of International Law.
