I have been honored to serve on a bipartisan Experts Committee on Preventing Mass Violence—convened by a coalition of human rights, religious, humanitarian, and peace organizations—for the purpose of generating a set of concrete recommendations around the atrocities prevention imperative for the next administration. Our final recommendations and report are now available here. Additional recommendations are directed at Congress and civil society.
The recommendations in the report are geared towards strengthening existing initiatives and tools, developing new ideas and measures, and further instantiating this priority into U.S. foreign policy. Key top-line recommendations include the following:
- The imperative of atrocities prevention must be, and be seen to be, a priority in the White House to signal high-level attention and support. The report contains a number of concrete recommendations aimed at further developing and improving the atrocities prevention bureaucratic infrastructure. All agencies should offer relevant training in atrocities prevention.
- High-level attention and support must be followed by consistent funding dedicated to atrocities prevention. The Atrocities Prevention Board (APB) was supposed to be a revenue neutral enterprise, which overtaxed agencies. Allocating sufficient funding and personnel through a proposed Early Prevention and Response account will ensure that the national security bureaucracy takes prevention seriously. It will also help to expand policy coordination across the interagency and between regional and functional offices.
- The report calls for better alignment between preventing and countering violent extremism initiatives (P/CVE) focused on non-state actors (NSAs) with atrocities prevention efforts, given the role that NSAs play in propagating mass atrocities.
- It also calls for Treasury to revisit the feasibility of creating a stand-alone sanctions regime dedicated to atrocities prevention (independent of any country designation) and aimed at perpetrators and enablers. (A notional Executive Order is available here). Treasury should be appropriately resourced to enable it to hire the staff necessary to manage such authorities.
- Building on the monthly intelligence briefings for the APB, the U.S. government should continue to enhance its capacity to undertake focused and timely intelligence collection for the purposes of early warning aimed at below-the-radar crises.
- Agencies should aim for greater up-stream early prevention in fragile or at-risk countries to build resilience and strengthen norms against violence and discrimination. This includes support for transitional justice and post-conflict stabilization initiatives to reduce social marginalization and conflict and to strengthen civil society and the commitment to human rights.
- Embassies and posts have a crucial role to play in this work and should be augmented, rather than drawn down, when mass atrocities are looming to ensure a more effective on-the-ground response. The government should streamline the process whereby expertise can be surged to small embassies in at-risk situations.
- The United States should conduct a rigorous “lessons learned” process led by an independent outside reviewer, such as the National Defense University to avoid bias.
- The United States should pass a crimes against humanity statute, which would require the Department of Defense to drop its opposition to the measure. It should also amend the War Crimes Act to allow for “present-in” jurisdiction like other provisions of Title 18 concerned with the crimes of genocide, terrorism, torture, the use of child soldiers, trafficking, etc. (See my prior coverage here).
- While the United States has a unique role to play when it comes to this work, we should continue to promote international cooperation around at-risk and crisis situations to enable early and effective action. In particular, the United States should continue to work to assist and improve the capacity of the United Nations and regional/sub-regional organizations to deploy effective peacekeepers, particularly as they implement their civilian protection mandates.
- In terms of civil society, recommendations focus on the role that NGOs can play in building public support and a national constituency for atrocities prevention.
The report provides much more detailed and concrete suggestions for implementing each recommendation.
By way of background, President Obama has issued a number of Presidential Study Directives—his term for an executive policy order that is promulgated with the advice and consent of the National Security Council in order to spur an interagency review of some aspect of U.S. national security policy. In this administration, PSDs have addressed issues as varied as Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, National Space Policy, Nuclear Posture Review, Global Development, Export Control Reform, and Strengthening Military Families. In August 2011, President Obama issued Presidential Study Directive No. 10 (PSD-10), declaring the prevention of mass atrocities and genocide to be a core national security interest and core moral responsibility of the United States.
Read the full post at Just Security.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:11/07/2016