Preventing the Last Genocide
(Part One of Two)
Note: I am a lecturer at Yale University in the Department of Political Science. Among the topics on which I focus is the Rwandan genocide, and the politics of post-genocide Rwanda. I also have served as consultant for the UN Office of the Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide (OSAPG). In this two-part post I reflect on the enterprise of “genocide prevention” in light of the tenth anniversary of the seminal work of Samantha Power, as well as the tumultuous events of the past year.
It has been almost a decade since Samantha Power wrote her influential, Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Power demonstrated that the American foreign policy apparatus was essentially designed not to respond to genocide in any meaningful way. A Problem from Hell proposed two sets of sets of correctives. First, genocide must be recognized as such when it occurs. In order for genocide to be recognized, one must be able to imagine that genocide can – and does – occur, something that for many involves shedding illusions that genocide only involves fascists and gas chambers. For Power, though, it is the devious temptation to avoid responsibility to react, more than a lack of imagination, that has hindered Americans’ capacity to recognize of genocides. With respect to Rwanda, one of the cases of non-intervention in the 1990s that presumably inspired Power to write the book, State Department officials infamously dithered when asked whether the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi civilians constituted a “genocide.”
Power’s second corrective arises because stopping genocide is rarely a matter of national interest writ narrowly. Accordingly, a concerted effort is required to prompt a robust response. Namely:
• policy makers must prioritize responding to human tragedies even when realpolitik offers no counsel to do so;
• citizens must put pressure on policy makers to do so; and
• media and social entrepreneurs must inform and motivate the public to press for action.
Meanwhile a generation of genocide scholars, such as Barbara Harff and Gregory Stanton, developed something of a pathology of genocide. Taken together, this scholarship and Power’s recommendations seemed to open up the possibility that genocides could be anticipated – and prevented – before they began. Out of the tragedies of Rwanda and Bosnia arose an optimism that through a combination of attentiveness and political will, genocide prevention could really happen.
The (almost) ten years that have passed since the publication of A Problem from Hell have given us, unfortunately, several opportunities to put the emergent genocide prevention formulation to the test. The first and most obvious case was Darfur. Superficially, all the lessons were learned and implications applied: In 2004, experts (including New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof, the UN’s Rwanda peacekeeping force general Romeo Dallaire, and Power herself) inspired a grassroots movement that succeeded in injecting “Darfur” into the national discourse. The American President, the Secretary of State, and Congress responded, using the hitherto dreaded “g-word” in describing the situation. But efforts to prevent genocide then stalled. While Power’s formula might have been enough to prompt a robust response had it been applied to Rwanda, Darfur was not Rwanda. Sudan’s place in politics and the global economy (an emerging oil exporter and a member of the Arab League) complicated the response, which is to say it limited the United States’ options to bluster and half-hearted efforts at coalition-building.
