The recent resignation of the United Nations special adviser on the prevention of genocide Alice, Wairimu Nderitu, provides Secretary-General António Guterres with an opportunity to elevate atrocity prevention as a priority within the U.N. and revitalize an office that has regrettably become peripheral to global efforts to address these issues.
The Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), also known as “the Joint Office,” has its origins in the creation of two special adviser roles: the one on the prevention of genocide in 2004 and another on the responsibility to protect in 2008.
Two decades later, progress on the Joint Office’s mandate remains elusive, while the geopolitical landscape has shifted dramatically, marked by a growing tolerance for atrocity crimes globally, including within the U.N. In a recent policy report for the Stimson Center, we aimed to take stock of the Joint Office’s evolution, examining its responsibilities and capacities, and both its past and current challenges and successes.
Our findings indicate the office has not been a central actor in atrocity prevention efforts at the U.N. or globally. This comes amid ongoing conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar, and Democratic Republic of the Congo, where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or displaced, and warring parties repeatedly dismiss international criticism or appeals despite overwhelming evidence of widespread atrocities and grave human rights violations. The current geopolitical climate – characterized by rising authoritarianism and major world powers mired in political upheaval and seemingly unable to prioritize these issues – has further exacerbated the situation.
Despite broad support for atrocity prevention and R2P (the principle that the international community has a responsibility to protect populations from atrocity crimes) within the U.N. and among career civil servants in member States, the Joint Office has become increasingly marginalized. This raises questions about whether member States’ official endorsements of atrocity prevention reflect genuine commitment or are merely rhetorical posturing. Equally, the office has suffered from a lack of robust support from U.N. leadership, shifting its focus toward less contentious issues such as countering hate speech and engaging religious leaders, while its work on R2P has been insufficiently supported internally.
Our research indicates that the institutional and political incentives of the current geopolitical moment are aligned to constrain the Joint Office so that it is little more than a façade. “The Joint Office is just window dressing” with “little to no influence in the EOSG [Executive Office of the Secretary-General],” according to one former special adviser. Another interviewee with firsthand knowledge of meetings between the special advisers and senior management and decision-making teams in the EOSG put it bluntly: the Joint Office is “symbolically important only.” In the words of one government official, the Joint Office is valued merely for “the optics of being able to say the U.N. cares about genocide prevention.”
Every interview subject requested anonymity, many because they feared having their organizations, offices, and governments associated with criticisms of the office, critiques that could be seized upon by those who want to dismantle the global atrocity prevention architecture. Specifically, they were concerned with how the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban governments might purposefully misconstrue their comments, given the history of these governments opposing the Joint Office.
But interviewees also worried about declining support in the United States and European countries. That concern was shared not just by interviewees from the United States and Europe, but also by those from West and East Africa. “If this office goes away,” one said, “there are not enough votes in the U.N. to bring it back.”
Challenges: Structure Dynamics and Incentives within the UN System
The two special advisers have different – in principle complementary – roles. The special adviser for genocide prevention is mandated to collect information on atrocity situations, identify high-risk countries, advise the U.N. secretary-general and Security Council on current and possible future cases of concern, and facilitate inter-agency collaboration within the U.N. on atrocity prevention information-gathering, analysis, and policy. Though the title refers to genocide, the Joint Office focuses on all four types of atrocity crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.
The Joint Office is also mandated to promote the responsibility to protect norm – in other words, to press for action – when States either commit mass atrocities or fail to protect their civilian populations. This part of the office’s dual mandate is overseen by the special adviser on the responsibility to protect, a position currently held by Mô Bleeker of Switzerland.
Importantly, the Joint Office sits within a wider U.N. “ecosystem” of structures for atrocity prevention and the responsibility to protect. This includes not only the Security Council but also the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the Department of Peace Operations, the Human Rights Council, the International Court of Justice, various commissions of inquiry, and special representatives of the secretary-general. Member States and civil society organizations are also important actors.
By mandate, the office should play a central role within this ecosystem. In practice, however, it does not. A key issue is that the office’s dual mandate with its two distinct special advisers has not been adequately clarified, either conceptually or programmatically. Over time, this has created operational challenges and specifically resulted in the sidelining of the R2P mandate, a challenge that continues today. The special adviser on the responsibility to protect, in particular, has historically had limited budgetary and staff support, further marginalizing the implementation and impact of the mandate.
In addition to these structural challenges, the office has little internal capacity in terms of depth and breadth of expertise for analyzing possible atrocities cases, even though analysis is central to its mandate. This, in turn, has been exacerbated by the special advisers’ limited influence in the secretary-general’s office over important related policy discussions. Over time, these dynamics have led to a shift and narrowing of the office’s work, away from systematic atrocity prevention and work to advance the responsibility to protect.
Special Adviser Nderitu, of Kenya, applied her substantial skills as a conflict negotiator and mediator during her tenure from 2020 to 2024 to convene an array of civil society organizations to combat hate speech, with the goal of strengthening regional prevention architectures at the grassroots level. Among our interviewees, Nderitu’s turn to civil society organizations was seen as either entrepreneurial and visionary, or as a retreat from the challenging work of moving the U.N. bureaucracy on prevention.
Regardless, our interviewees were nearly unanimous in their assessment that the Joint Office’s programmatic focus on countering hate speech was a politically safe move that ran little risk of angering member States or causing political problems for the secretary-general. Supporters saw it as a creative way to do some good in the face of extraordinary institutional dysfunction, while critics said it marked the abdication of a difficult but important mandate.
Finally, structural pressures of the mandate, coupled with chronic underfunding and understaffing, have caused conflicts between the genocide prevention side and the responsibility to protect side of the Joint Office. None of our interviewees spoke of a time when the relationship between the two branches was conflict-free. This is an office, after all, with two leaders, each mandated to co-direct a shared team.
Yet, the R2P adviser receives a symbolic salary of $1 a year (now reduced to $0), while the genocide prevention adviser earns a regular U.N. salary and holds a higher rank in the U.N. system as under-secretary-general. According to our interviewees, interoffice tensions often escalated when staff faced conflicting directives or competing demands on their time, forcing them to choose between their superiors. While a strong working relationship between the two leaders of the Joint Office can smooth over these challenges, when competition and personal animosity are introduced, such organizational dynamics quickly become unworkable.
Predictably, the rank and stature imbalances between the special advisers have created challenges for staffing and daily office operations. Add to this today’s political pressures – ongoing atrocity situations in Sudan, Gaza, and Ukraine among many others; the general erosion of support for international law, including within the United States; and Arab powers blocking meaningful efforts to resolve proxy wars in North Africa and especially Sudan – and it’s easy to see how the only U.N. office explicitly mandated to advance atrocity prevention struggles to meet its nearly impossible mandate.
So, what should change?
Recommendations and Opportunities to Reengage
The vacancy for a new special adviser (which is currently filled on an acting basis by Virginia Gamba de Potgieter of Argentina) offers U.N. member States a timely opportunity for the U.N. to improve its approach to staffing, funding, and promoting the work of the Joint Office. As outlined in the 24 recommendations in our larger report, the path forward requires stronger engagement from the Joint Office on atrocity prevention and the responsibility to protect, accompanied by sustained support from the U.N. Secretariat and key U.N. actors.
Crucially, our interviewees overwhelmingly noted that while the Joint Office’s mandate directs it to work internally within the U.N. system, this work can provoke tensions with member States and complicate cooperation on other priority matters. In response, the Joint Office has increasingly abandoned its mandate, turning instead to activities outside the U.N. more characteristic of NGOs: training civil society leaders and mid-level officials of states, engaging religious leaders, and conducting workshops on identifying and countering hate speech.
Our research highlights the critical need for the Joint Office to realign with its mandate and to find ways to reengage U.N. member States in advancing genocide prevention and the responsibility to protect.
States themselves can take numerous concrete steps to support this, in cooperation with U.N. leadership. One of the best we heard is that States should indicate to the Executive Office of the Secretary General their support for the Joint Office implementing a country-specific reporting system and policy-response plan to push cases of concern through the U.N. bureaucracy, engaging various offices and agencies. The two special advisers would then report progress regularly to the secretary-general. But improving the Office’s effectiveness within the U.N. bureaucracy requires a more fundamental first step.
Yet, before any technical recommendation can become actionable mandates or policies, U.N. member States must first decide whether atrocity prevention is truly a diplomatic priority. If preventing mass atrocities is indeed a core value of the U.N. and its member States – something far from clear today – then those States must undertake the difficult task of redefining and renegotiating their collective understandings and commitments about what types of violence and atrocities they aim to prevent, why, and what they are willing to do to achieve that result in practice.
The Executive Office of the Secretary General also has a role to play. For example, it could better integrate the special advisers into relevant high-level policy meetings and advocate more strongly for the responsibility to protect in Joint Office budget proposals before the U.N. Third Committee, the General Assembly’s committee on social, humanitarian, and cultural issues, which plays a leading role on human rights issues at the U.N.
How the U.N. selects its next special adviser is also important. Historically, high-level U.N. appointments have often been through opaque processes, and our research suggests the Joint Office is no exception. To ensure the next special adviser brings deep expertise in both atrocity prevention practice and research, the secretary-general should seek input from global atrocity prevention experts, including civil society organizations from around the world, while ensuring the next appointee has the practical know-how to navigate the complexities of the U.N. system and build effective relationships within it.
In the near term, the Joint Office should identify opportunities, such as the 2025 U.N. peacebuilding architecture review, to advance atrocity prevention and R2P institutionally. Strengthening collaboration with key U.N. partners to embed these priorities in their work is also key. The office’s engagement with the peacebuilding architecture review would provide valuable opportunities to initiate difficult but necessary conversations among States about their priorities and commitment to genocide prevention and R2P’s implementation.
Finally, the U.N. should consider consolidating both special adviser positions into a single role: a special adviser on the responsibility to protect and genocide prevention, who holds the title of under-secretary-general. This unified position would naturally lead a consolidated office, eliminating the conceptual split between genocide and atrocity prevention from the responsibility to protect, an arbitrary distinction that arose from the historical development of these two concepts within the organization.
Conclusions
U.N. member States all claim to want peace, even those perpetrating or enabling mass atrocities. Now is the time to determine where they draw the line in defining peace and how much violence they are willing to tolerate.
If member States are serious about preventing atrocities, they must engage in dialogue about their collective commitments and collaboratively redefine how atrocity prevention and civilian protection should be undertaken at the U.N. Our interviewees suggested that Bleeker is currently well-positioned to lead member States in this difficult conversation.
These discussions should be carried forward into the 2025 U.N. peacebuilding architecture review and should inform the selection process for the next special adviser for genocide prevention — whether through consolidation of the two offices or by appointing a successor to Nderitu.