In a recent exchange on Just Security, Youk Chhang responded to Douglas Irvin-Erickson and Ernesto Verdeja’s evaluation of the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Irvin-Erickson and Verdeja diagnosed the office’s limited outcomes on mass atrocity prevention as the result of a lack of resources and high-level political support and a muddled institutional mandate. Chhang, a major global human rights figure and respected expert on post-genocide recovery and genocide prevention, responded by arguing that any global strategy, no matter how well-imagined, cannot succeed without grounding it in local communities to ensure impact, equity, and long-term sustainability.
Both analyses, which essentially present the existing genocide prevention architecture at the U.N. as failing, remain wedded to the notion that genocide prevention in the U.N., at its best, requires external actors intervening in the messy realities of mass atrocities. Both are top-down approaches (even Chhang’s, which calls for the U.N. to partner with local communities), offering general recommendations as effective responses to prevent genocide. I also have spent decades post-conflict situations, serving as both as a public official in local district-level governance and as a practitioner facilitating reconciliation and providing mental health and psychosocial support services and capacity building across East Africa.
My experience tells me that, rather than abstract prescriptions and a focus on inter-office dynamics, the U.N. should consider whether it could institutionalize local actors as first responders. In this scenario, international response would be complementary rather than a substitute for local actors as the agents enshrined with the responsibility to protect.
One promising avenue might be to develop adaptive sources of grounded knowledge. Generating this kind of knowledge would entail a sort of mapping of actors — social and political leaders from private and public domains — and developing simulations for effective responses. Such interactive platforms could help take stock of actors and institutions that could be important preventively and proactively, with the local levels — both State and non-State — as the epicenter of knowledge and action.
Local leaders have a comparative advantage over abstract or distant institutions because they have the necessary concrete knowledge that increases the probability of success for interventions to prevent atrocities. Who makes up the local leaders is an empirical judgment, but best done with a great deal of openness on agency, social integration, and life history of action and social service commitment. The local-global connection should not become yet another space where those involved dispense rhetoric about the mission of locally-led, locally-owned prevention programs even while they are sidetracked by the logic of donor-funded agendas and individual rationality. In contrast, I envision the kind of social grouping that would demonstrate a great deal of sensitivity to the degree to which initiatives are locally-led and -owned in action and outcome, both in design and in delivery.
The Promise of Organized Local Efforts for Prevention
In Africa at least, local residents are more likely to read the signals and undertones of trouble, long before the prestigious international institutions that monitor atrocity risk in far-off corners of the world. It is, therefore, the prompt and warranted action of local leadership and peoples against mass atrocities within their communities that holds greater promise of prevention, because it is they who must confront the clear choices and the moral consequences of their own action or lack of action. This bottom-up approach is not a mere intellectual prescription for some enlightened actors for their own parochial pride; rather this local-actor model is broad-based and inclusive.
For instance, in 2021, Somalia was on the brink of yet another civil war because Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (known as Farmaajo), a president who hailed from the diaspora, was determined to extend his term in office. With memories of the 1990s civil war fresh in the minds of Somalis, we recognized the signals in rhetoric and patterns of violence such as actions taken against the opposition. We saw general civil strife of various degrees and in chaotic and organized forms. We also saw differences from the 1990s experience: while the previous civil war was the result of a power struggle, this time it was related to competing territorial claims over who belonged where. Some of us understood that this kind of rhetoric had often preceded mass atrocities such as the genocide in Rwanda.
This time, however, local civil society was better-organized in multiple parts of the country and responded with greater courage. For instance, organizations jointly issued a letter calling for a peaceful transfer of power. Somali women were in the forefront of many efforts to secure a peaceful transition. I led a national women’s team for peace named #Gogol Dumar, meaning “forum for women peace.” It was an effort that challenged the traditional patriarchal mode of peacebuilding via men’s peace forums, and it sought to make the role and responsibility of women in conflict prevention natural and organic. The movement also promoted the idea that the responsibility for peace should be cross-sectoral, and all voices should be included.
The pressure from Somali civil society resulted in the prime minister, Hussien Roble, and leaders from Galmudug and Hirshabele states aligning themselves with the idea of a peaceful transfer of power and issuing a statement unequivocally endorsing such a goal.
It was a pivotal moment that spared the country from another civil war, for it presented a clear political signal for any ambitious politician blinded by their lust for power. Not only was the signal locally rooted, but it occurred in close coordination with international partners who complemented and at times reinforced local agency.
State Sovereignty as a Responsibility
The U.N.’s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect were created in the aftermaths of extreme mass atrocities on the African continent, including in Rwanda, where the United Nations did not intervene to prevent the genocide of 1994. At the time, Francis Deng and his colleagues from the Brookings Institution started a healthy conversation about State sovereignty as a responsibility. They described that responsibility as both a national obligation to ensure the welfare of citizens and a global imperative when countries engage in gross violations against the rights of their citizens. The traditional understanding of sovereignty prevents foreign powers from intervening in the affairs of another State. Deng and colleagues wanted this tradition revisited. The result years later was the idea that States have a “responsibility to protect” against violations at home and abroad, and still later produced the joint Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).
However, this essentially was yet another response from Western democracies to try to solve problems in the Global South. For grassroots movements working for peace in countries on the brink of genocide or countries trapped in unending structural violence, non-intervention debates are a luxury. For them, the U.N.’s current division of labor in preventing genocide and advancing the responsibility to protect does not serve the idea of sovereignty as a responsibility. These offices must merge into one and speak with one voice — and moreover speak on behalf of civil society. It must pressure States to privilege peace over violence.
Representatives of civil society understand the resistance against intervention, but also refuse the status quo when unchecked powers fall into the hands of violent dictators. We refuse to accept that nothing can be done about it. Tell a resident of Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo who is fleeing mass atrocities right now that there is a U.N. adviser on genocide prevention and another one on the responsibility to protect, and ask them what they think about it. Tell a Ukrainian who is being bombed by Russia that nothing can be done because matters of sovereignty are at stake in a neighboring country — the aggressor, no less.
The Meaning of Sovereignty in an Interdependent World
Two ideas might help move the discussion forward. One is to resurrect the concept of sovereignty as responsibility. In today’s wars, people and nation-States are fighting over resources that cross State boundaries. Frontiers drawn in the colonial era are questioned everywhere. Every permanent member of the U.N. Security Council – the United States, the U.K., France, Russia, and China — is involved in a territorial or border dispute somewhere on this planet. And migration – much of which is spurred by violent conflict – is the persistent hot topic challenging Western democracies. We all must re-imagine what it means to be sovereign in a world in which interdependence and international relations are messy.
The second idea is concrete and can precede the resolution of the first: merge the two U.N. offices into one and collectively work to push the responsibility to protect norm back to its origins in the idea of sovereignty as responsibility, before the concept was captured by Western democracies to legitimize intervention in non-Western societies. Societies that spiral into mass atrocities or genocide often have had preceding experiences of collective trauma and mass exclusion of certain groups. Very little can be done by external state actors and international institutions to change these dynamics; this must be addressed by the people involved on the ground, led by local civil society.
The exchange between Irvin-Erickson and Verdeja, on the one hand, and Chhang on the other fails to consider the psychosocial state of societies that become vulnerable to the risk of atrocities. Even when some countries enter a post-conflict phase, the focus on prevention is often placed on political institutions, and less agency is developed for addressing psychosocial resilience. True post-conflict atrocity prevention is both institutional and social, and mental health is the differential providing the means of sustainable change.
In Somalia, we are stuck in a post-conflict limbo, even though the governance institutions — both governmental and non-governmental — have gained ever-greater strength. What gives us hope — in addition to overall exhaustion from protracted conflict — is the degree of social reckoning that has occurred, creating greater recognition that maintaining peace must be the collective responsibility of all local and national leaders. Still, the risk remains that the country’s politics can collapse into factions, due in part to the legacy of war trauma. Groups in conflict, for example, often harken to the 1990s to justify new violence.
A newly rebooted United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect should look beyond the great-power conflicts that produce stagnation in the Security Council. It should re-set to work directly with local communities in matters of trauma healing and reconciliation, with culturally specific methods of supporting locally led early warning and early intervention work to de-escalate tensions before they spin into violent conflict.
As these debates continue, current events and political changes in the world may help grassroots movements in the Global North and the Global South see that they have more in common now than ever before and could work together more productively. They also could work jointly to support representatives at the U.N. trying to address these issues. Until now, it sounds like the office of these special advisers have spent more time struggling to fit into the U.N. machinery than they have spent working for the people who desperately need them. Such leaders might be able to deliver better results with more consistent backing and critical thinking from civil society dealing with these issues in a frighteningly increasing number of places around the world.