Prevention

The goal of prevention has had a central role in the study of genocide ever since Raphael Lemkin coined the term.  Some early scholarship addressed the Holocaust as a failure of prevention – i.e., asking how it was that the international system allowed it to happen.  After the Holocaust, the advent of the genocide convention (formally titled “Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”) seemed to put in place a regime of “Never Again.”  Late-twentieth century genocides put to rest the notion that such a regime was self-actualizing.  As Samantha Power pointed out in A Problem from Hell, her award-winning book about failures to prevent genocide, features of both domestic (at least in the United States’ case) and international politics are set up to reduce the types of interventions that might be able to prevent genocides from unfolding.

These failures of prevention have ushered in new efforts to create a more robust international prevention regime founded in a norm of the “Responsibility to Protect,” and in institutional innovations like an office of a Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations.  Scholars have also begun to ask what features of a society, as well as what strategies articulated well in advance of the time at which an armed intervention might be considered, might also work to prevent genocide.