We live in an age in which so much depends on a strong sense of global community, and yet so many of our problems trace back to how weak that unifying sense is. This theme is most tragic when it appears in the form genocide, ethnic cleansings, and other manifestations of the deadly politics of identity. For all the vows that there would never again be another genocide, reality proves otherwise. Yet again, millions of people have been killed, maimed, raped, displaced, and otherwise victimized while the international community—including the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, and others—continues too often to do too little too late.

If we cannot turn the “never again” pledge from rhetoric to reality, how can we genuinely claim to be a global community? Time and again we have witnessed man’s inhumanity at its basest, most venal, and most outrageous. But where is the outrage? It has been nonexistent in recent US administrations—not George H.W. Bush over Bosnia, not Bill Clinton over Rwanda, not George W. Bush over Darfur. It has not been coming from the United Nations, where countless resolutions about being “seized with the matter” are approved and then become “seized up” when it comes to meaningful action. And outrage has certainly not occurred in the many countries that buy into invocations of state sovereignty with little regard for supposedly shared values and commitments, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention.

There is no doubt that breaking the vicious political cycle of identity is difficult. But it is possible. Bosnia and Rwanda were rife with missed opportunities—so, too, was Darfur. Breaking the cycle is necessary for tangible reasons, as these conflicts feed and breed other conflicts, including terrorism, and it is necessary for less tangible, but deeply penetrating reasons, such as determining whether the legacy we leave to future generations is one of despair or hope.

Key Questions in the Policy Debate

Looking across key cases, we can identify five core questions that frame policy debates on genocide prevention and related humanitarian intervention. What are the driving forces behind ethnic conflict and genocide? When should military force be used? Why is intervention justified? Who decides on intervention? What constitutes effective intervention?

Driving Forces?: Many policymakers take the “primordialist” view of these conflicts, viewing them as the playing out of histories of fixed, inherited, deeply antagonistic group identities. In this understanding of ethnic strife, the end of the Cold War stripped away the constraining effects of the strategic overlay of bipolar geopolitics, restoring what Robert Kaplan called the “Balkan ghosts” and other historical hatreds to their “natural” states of conflict.

But while history shapes, it does not determine conflicts nearly to the extent posited in such theories. A number of studies have shown that ethnic identities are much less fixed over time and that the frequency and intensity of ethnic conflict vary more than primordialist theory would have it. The point is made, albeit with some hyperbole, in a statement by a Bosnian Muslim schoolteacher: “We never, until the war, thought of ourselves as Muslims. We were Yugoslavs. But when we began to be murdered because we are Muslims things changed. The definition of who we are today has been determined by our killing.”

That killing was not some pre-determined playing out of history, but an intentional playing on history by the likes of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to inflame grievances and prejudices into hatreds and killings. Such was the case in Rwanda and elsewhere. The driving dynamic has been more purposive than primordial, resulting primarily from conscious calculations made by leaders and groups whose needs could be served by political violence. It is true, as William Faulkner once wrote, that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But historical influence is one thing, and historical determinism is quite another.

When Military Force?: Noninterventionism has largely served the post–World War II international system well. Constraints on the major powers helped maintain order and security. Protections for small countries and newly independent states emerging from colonialism buttressed self-determination, freedom, and justice. In this worldview, force was to be a last resort and, if used, was highly restricted. But Bosnia, Rwanda, and other identity conflicts have exposed deep and disturbing contradictions between the limits of the traditional noninterventionist regime and the very norms and values of peace, justice, and humanitarianism on which the UN system claims to rest. These cases have shown that while force should never be a first resort, it should at times be an early, and not just last, option. “There are situations in which a quick, early use of force may well be the best method,” writes Harvard Professor Stanley Hoffmann, “and the only one capable of preventing a further aggravation of the [humanitarian] crisis.” For if the threshold for intervention is that the bodies have already started to pile up, it can hardly be considered humanitarian. One can consider it perhaps less inhumane than not acting at all—but that is not exactly a high standard.

Justification for Intervention?: Examining the debate over the rights and responsibilities that come with state sovereignty in an international community is critical for understanding justifications for intervention or nonintervention. The traditional concept that sovereignty is a right maintains that states have jurisdictional exclusivity within their own borders, granting very limited bases of legitimacy to other actors, be they other states or an international institution, to intervene in what could be considered domestic affairs. But in an era in which intrastate clashes have become the dominant and most lethal form of conflict, the international community cannot continue to readily accept the invocation of state sovereignty as a normative barrier behind which aggression can hide. The UN Charter, stressed Secretary-General Kofi Annan, “was issued in the name of ‘the people,’ not the governments…. It was never meant as a license for governments to trample on human rights and human dignity.”

It was not so much that other states had a right to intervene but that the international community had a “responsibility to protect.” This distinction may seem like semantics, but it makes a crucial difference in legitimizing intervention in intrastate conflicts. In 2005, building on the important work done by the semi-official International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, the United Nations did adopt the “responsibility to protect” as a norm, stating that “the principle of non-intervention in internal affairs cannot be used to protect genocidal acts or other atrocities” and claiming to affirm “the collective international responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” There was, however, much equivocation in the text. Worse, despite the adopted norm, there was inaction in the first test case of Darfur.