Genocide in Gaza - January 2025
Taylor & Francis Online
https://www.tandfonline.com › doi › full › 10.1080 › 14623528.2025.2452707
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The Gaza Genocide in Five Crises
I will write: Creator of Death, leave me alone for a while … let me beFootnote1
The Israeli annihilation of Gaza that began on 7 October 2023 has illuminated the ways in which power, law, and norms operate in global human rights discourse. The unrelenting violence throws into relief the tensions in global governance and human rights protection norms, forcing us to confront – once again – the nature of international law, the responsibility to protect (R2P) norm, and atrocity prevention more broadly. What crimes are worthy of global attention? And what crimes are not? What are the consequences of this reckoning for the field of genocide studies? What remains of R2P, international law, and multilateral atrocity prevention in this new global configuration? If these questions suggest, on the hand, a weary kind of Nietzschean eternal return where we are condemned to repeat the same debates in the shadow of the same suffering, they also underscore in their pressing immediacy how fragile the current moment is for human rights and civilian protection.
This article examines these issues as a series of cascading crises that have been amplified by the immediate genocidal crisis facing Gazans. It discusses five crises: the crisis in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, particularly Gaza; in Genocide and Holocaust studies; in international law; in the United Nations’ (UN) responsibility to protect norm; and in international multilateral atrocity prevention efforts. These are of course not the only crises of note; there are many more we could identify. But they illustrate the scope of issues that Gaza has brought to the surface of genocide research, international criminal law, and contemporary atrocity prevention praxis. Referring to them as crises highlights, moreover, the urgent attention they require from scholars and prevention practitioners. And certainly, the Gazan genocide is not the sole driver of these crises – they have longer and more profound roots – but Gaza brings to the surface a rippling effect of crises in the global order, even if many were evident in various forms well before 7 October.
I begin with a brief overview of the most immediate crisis, the genocide itself, and then widen the scope to consider how Gaza has shed light on the tensions and limitations of scholarship, law, and policy.
The Gaza Genocide as a Pivotal Moment
The most concrete crisis is the one engulfing Gazans and all Palestinians. The 7 October abductions and slaughter of Israelis and foreigners by Hamas and its allies mark a major inflection point between Israel and the occupied Palestinian people. Those horrific attacks, clearly a violation of international humanitarian law, were reciprocated with a massive military campaign by the Israeli state which, as of this writing, has taken the lives of over 45,000 people and subjected the entire Gazan population to mass bombings, starvation, disease, displacement, the razing of infrastructure, and unrelenting psychological terror. The campaign has been brutal even by Israeli military standards, combining indiscriminate lethal violence with exterminationist discourse; indeed, even some Israeli voices have condemned the violence. A November 2024 editorial in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz stated that “Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza is on display for all to see,” and in December a former Israeli defense minister and general, Moshe Yaalon, condemned Israeli military crimes and warned that the campaign seeks “to conquer, to annex, to carry out ethnic cleansing,” a startling accusation from a hawkish voice.Footnote2
More notably, the alarm over genocide has been raised by human rights experts since nearly the beginning of Israel’s assault. In October 2023, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Palestine reported to the UN Human Rights Council that the military campaign amounted to “genocide as colonial erasure,”Footnote3 and in March 2024, the Special Rapporteur reported that
there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. More broadly, they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signaling a tragedy foretold.Footnote4
That November, a UN Special Committee of experts found that Israel’s methods are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palestinians there”; soon afterwards, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch declared genocide is occurring.Footnote7 These and numerous other findings by human rights experts point to the genocidal nature of Israel’s campaign.
Of course, the campaign occurs against the backdrop not only of the 7 October massacres but in the shadow of Israel’s ongoing systemic repression of the Palestinian people, sanctioned by a history of discriminatory regulations. This repression is underpinned by distinct logics of national security, territorial control, and ethnonationalist supremacy that have functioned to legitimize Israeli domination over Palestinians. Today those logics reinforce one another to justify the ongoing campaign. The complex web of injustice spun by the desire for security, territory, and supremacy has changed over time, combining structural, cultural, epistemic, and direct forms of violence in various configurations, but broadly includes forced population displacement, land theft and resettlement by Israeli Jewish citizens, the destruction of Palestinian homes and places of cultural, religious, and educational significance, exploitation of natural resources, arbitrary arrest, torture, restrictions on movement, physical and psychological fragmentation of Palestinian communities, and mass and individual killings.Footnote8
Notably, human rights groups have long called for the dismantlement of this system.Footnote9 The Israeli human rights organization B’tselem and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have referred to this as apartheid. Most recently, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), found that Israel’s 58-year occupation of Palestinian territories violates international human rights law.Footnote10 This landmark determination on the occupation by the primary judicial body of the UN reaffirms in no uncertain terms the illegality of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian civilians, though the violations of Palestinians are not limited to the formal occupied territories.Footnote11
Nevertheless, this current and explicitly genocidal phase of violence, different qualitatively from earlier Israeli military operations in terms of scope, intention, and destructiveness, marks a crisis moment for all Palestinians under Israeli state control. Israel seeks a Carthaginian peace. This is a pivotal moment for Palestinians and Israelis, even if the long-term consequences remain unclear. Furthermore, making sense of this moment, how to conceptualize and term it, has in turn created a crisis for the field of Genocide and Holocaust studies, which has historically largely shied away from examining the plight of Palestinian civilians.
Genocide and Holocaust Studies
Raz Segal, Luigi Daniele, Omar McDoom, and Amos Goldberg, among others, have noted in this forum how the Gaza genocide has raised profound challenges for Genocide and Holocaust studies, as the genocide poses unsettling questions over the moral status of victims and justifications of sovereign violence.Footnote12 Abdelwahab El-Affendi has even referred to the “futility of genocide studies after Gaza.”Footnote13 To understand this crisis, it is necessary to examine the field’s origins and dominant frames of reference.
The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) defines genocide as any of a specific set of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”Footnote14 Although the definition has been sharply criticized by experts for a variety of reasons, a few of which I discuss in Part 3, the point is that genocide broadly refers to the intentional targeting of a civilian group for destruction, whether wholly or partly. Most subsequent definitions used by scholars have incorporated these fundamental elements of intentional group destruction.Footnote15 Even so, as the field of comparative genocide research emerged and coalesced in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the Holocaust that set the standard, whether explicitly or not, for what could be appropriately labelled a genocide.Footnote16 To the extent that a given case conformed to the defining elements of the Holocaust as then understood – such as an exterminationist ideology rooted in fantasies of racial purity, the categorical targeting of Jews because of their identity, the use of highly modern techniques of destruction, and the deployment of a rational and preexisting plan of extermination during total war – it could plausibly qualify as a genocide. Some of those elements, like a preexisting plan, have been disproven or significantly revised by subsequent research, but the special place of the Holocaust remained in place in comparative research.Footnote17
In this sense, the Holocaust was seen as the fullest expression of genocidal violence, and thus unique. But “uniqueness” was never straightforward, and actually functioned at several distinct analytical registers. The first was empirical, and concerns the specific dynamics, patterns, and scope of violence among other observable phenomena. In empirical terms, the Holocaust no doubt has elements of uniqueness and similarity with other cases, by now thoroughly studied. But the uniqueness debate also unfolded on a normative register. It dealt with how to understand the evil of the Holocaust, and included at least two general areas of inquiry, ontology and epistemology. The ontological questions revolved around whether the Holocaust is uniquely or more profoundly evil compared to other genocides or episodes of mass suffering, and if so, what makes it exceptionally evil (or, in a variation of this, how does the Holocaust redefine the grammar of evil).Footnote18
The second element was epistemic: how can we make sense of such a caesura in our understanding of the world? Is the world morally intelligible after the Holocaust?Footnote19 These debates in turn posed questions over the nature of modernity, the existence and intentions of God, the relation between “civilization” and barbarism, and the relative normative status of other monstrous harms like the colonial and postcolonial genocides of indigenous peoples, the Atlantic slave trade, Marxist genocides, and so forth. Throughout this, the Holocaust often remained the touchstone for normative theorizing about genocide.
Nevertheless, as comparative empirical work on genocide grew in the 1990s and afterwards, genocide studies emerged as a separate though related field of research that largely reframed the Holocaust as one of several genocides, empirically distinct in important ways but also showing some similarities. For comparativists or researchers examining other cases, the Holocaust was no longer the defining measure of what was and was not a genocide.Footnote20 As genocide studies expanded and drew away from Holocaust studies, the old debates around the normative uniqueness of the Holocaust receded, even while remaining an anchor point for those scholars, research and teaching centres, journals, and museums focused on the Holocaust.
Gaza has brought these somewhat dormant tensions over the appropriateness of comparability back to the surface, but now refracted in new ways. Although the violent repression of Palestinians is, of course, well-known, it has not been central to genocide research outside of the work of scholars working on the intersection of genocide and settler colonialism or who are specialists on Palestine-Israel.Footnote21 But the Gaza genocide now appears to represent a crisis for the field: the genocide accusation against Israel is anathema to the view that Israel has a special moral standing because it was established precisely in response to the horrors of the extermination of Jews. The charge of genocide has led to heated debates among scholars in a way that has not happened with genocides in Myanmar, Sudan, Rwanda, and elsewhere.Footnote22
This is evident in the polemics around how to understand the violence in Gaza. Within two months of the 7 October attack, scholars were already contending that Israel’s campaign was genocidal or was on the cusp of becoming so. In mid-October, Raz Segal, a Jewish Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, wrote that it was a “textbook case” of genocide.Footnote23 By November, scholars wrote an open letter warning of genocide: the extensive siege, denial of food and medicine, indiscriminate attacks, and dehumanizing language of the Israeli leadership framing all Palestinians as existential threats amounted to a clear danger of imminent or possibly already occurring genocide.Footnote24 An opposing letter signed primarily by Holocaust scholars placed all responsibility on Hamas and likened the group to Nazis.Footnote25 In December, another open letter warned of incitement to genocide, and called for scholars and institutions to actively work for a ceasefire.Footnote26 Of course, positions on Gaza do not line up neatly by whether one is primarily a Holocaust expert; a number of notable Holocaust scholars have called events in Gaza a genocide.Footnote27
To be sure, some of the early disagreements were over whether Israeli leaders displayed the intent of destroying the Gazan civilian population “in whole or in part,” per the UNCG that stipulates the centrality of perpetrator intention, which can create a thicket of interpretative issues.Footnote28 But for many comparativists, even those disagreements were often quite narrow in range, between those who believed genocide was occurring and those who feared it was imminent. That level of scholarly disagreement in genocide studies is not uncommon and reflects the typical challenges of connecting intentions and actions in “real time.” This is not the kind of disagreement that would throw a field into crisis.
Instead, the crisis reflects more profound normative disagreements over who is a legitimate victim worth grieving, how and when – if at all – mass violence can be justified, and over the (exceptional) moral status of the state of Israel.Footnote29 When we look at the existing evidence and compare this to the UNCG’s definition of genocide, it is evident the crisis is not one over empirics; by any reasonable assessment of the facts, what is happening in Gaza is genocidal or very close to it, and the scope of reasonable interpretations is not wide. This is not a crisis over methods for evaluating empirical evidence, for the atrocities are well-documented. In fact, they are better and more minutely documented in real time than many other cases. Nor do we lack information on expressions of genocidal intent from Israeli leaders.Footnote30 Certainly, there are disagreements over legal interpretations of intentionality central to the Genocide Convention (discussed in Part 3), even if evidence of genocidal intent has, to many scholars including me, become incontrovertible.
Rather, the crisis is a product of the particular history and origins of the field and how the condition of Palestinians remains outside of the normative priorities and analytical interest of many scholars, even while the atrocities continue. The crisis stems from the consequences of what it means to accuse a state of genocidal behaviour whose self-understanding is partly, but crucially, tied to providing a safe haven to Jews from future genocide. More precisely, there are at least three related but distinct issues at the centre of this debate in the field: the first is whether the Holocaust should be the primary empirical and normative metric by which to evaluate other instances of mass atrocities. The reemergence of this issue, one that most genocide scholars had thought settled, suggests the powerful way in which reference to the Holocaust can be used to demarcate what is and what is not a genocide, and in the process is used to exclude Gaza from consideration.Footnote31 The Holocaust becomes simultaneously unique and universal: it is a morally unique event because of its evil, but also universal in that all cases, especially now Gaza, are measured according to it. The second issue revolves around whether accusing Israel of committing genocide is antisemitic, which critics say creates a morally appalling equivalence between Jews and Nazis (even if numerous Jews have called this a genocide). And the third issue concerns whether calling Israel a settler colonial state and Zionism a supremacist ideology is antisemitic.Footnote32 This last point is wider in scope, as it speaks to the very legitimacy of the Israeli state in its current form – that is, as a state that combines liberal democracy with apartheid rule – and it remains the most contentious of the three. These three issues at the centre of the current scholarly crises over representation are all marked by discourses of exceptionality. Defenders of the Israeli military campaign frequently claim that the Gaza atrocities do not carry the same moral weight or horror as the Holocaust and thus cannot be called genocide, and moreover that the genocide accusation by activists and scholars is antisemitic because it unfairly singles out Israel. And, implicitly, that Israel’s foundation and consolidation should not be examined through any of the established social scientific categories used in the study of repression, ideology, colonialism, or violence.
But these are crises, and not merely typical scholarly points of contention, only if one accepts the premises of exceptionality as carrying normative weight that exempts Israeli policy from the same empirical and normative scrutiny that would (or should) be directed toward any other state committing atrocities. If, instead, we emphasize that no people, regardless of who they are, should suffer mass atrocities, and that Israel should be held to the standards of international humanitarian and human rights law, it becomes clear that the field’s crisis is born of an unwillingness to accept the full humanity of Palestinians, and not of any more mundane methodological disagreements typical of scholarship.
It is somewhat curious that Genocide Studies is also once again enmeshed in debates over the limitations of genocide as an analytical concept. What has happened in Gaza since 7 October does not challenge the analytical coherence of even the conventional and narrow understandings of genocide – certainly not in the same way that the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Cambodian genocide against the Khmer, or the attritional genocides typical of colonial expansion in the Americas and Australia have done. Those and many other cases revealed profound analytical shortcomings of the genocide concept, and in turn they have generated a wealth of sophisticated interventions into how genocide relates to other forms of violence.Footnote33 And yet by the most inflexible interpretation of genocide, Gaza qualifies as genocidal. Certainly, the full Palestinian experience of injustice since the Nakba is not completely captured by conventional readings of the concept of genocide, and the expansion of war into Lebanon along with the complex web of linkages to violence in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere reveal how any discussion of these broader systems of mass violence requires careful theoretical and analytical parsing. But even putting aside those valuable theoretical interventions on the concept of genocide that aim to expand the term’s remit and horizon – even if we remain steadfastly committed to the most conservative reading of genocide – what is happening in Gaza today is genocidal. The field’s crisis is not methodological or analytical. It is a crisis over the boundaries of normative exceptionality and the political and moral struggle over policing which bodies count and which do not. Of course, whether international courts will ultimately determine that genocide is occurring is a different matter, given the troublesome historical tendency to interpret genocide – and also war crimes, for that matter – in ways respectful to sovereign power.
International Law
The third crisis takes us from scholarly debates to international law. The crisis of Palestinians in Gaza is also the crisis of Gaza for the global legal order. International law and institutions are now badly damaged; in the words of over thirty UN experts, “the international order is breaking down in Gaza.”Footnote34 This crisis of global governance systems, amplified by the genocides in Gaza and Ukraine, has revealed how international law has weakened and today appears incapable of restraining violent sovereign power. Although the power of international law has waxed and waned over time, at present it is not evident how it can reestablish its relevance for administering accountability for atrocities.
Consider how law is simultaneously regulative and constitutive. It regulates certain types of behaviour by marking the boundary between what is prohibited and what is permitted. In doing so, it necessarily constitutes categories of violations and victims, though these may not reflect the experiential complexity and depth of lived suffering. This constitutive dimension of law delineates legally recognized and thus worthy victims, and legally unrecognized, or unworthy, victims. The double movement of regulation and constitution, which is also a kind of political and normative demarcation written in the grammar of jurisprudence, is particularly apparent today in the legal crimes of genocide and war crimes, both of which are often interpreted in ways that are deferential to state perpetrators, either through legal interpretations that establish high thresholds for proving genocidal intentionality and recognize a limited set of victim categories, or through the juridical deployment of exceptions that weaken the law’s applicability.
The Genocide Convention, as noted earlier in Part 2, refers to a set of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”Footnote35 This is normally interpreted as requiring proof of special intent (dolus specialis) to destroy a civilian group, so merely large-scale violence on its own is insufficient to qualify legally as genocide. Rather, it is necessary to show not only that the perpetrator committed relevant criminal acts, but did so with the specific intent of civilian group destruction, in whole or in part. Remaining within the tight parameters of legal texts and precedent, jurists have debated the substance and limits of special intent.Footnote36
The International Court of Justice, for example, has historically interpreted genocidal intentionality in narrow terms. The ICJ’s 2007 judgment in Bosnia vs. Serbia states that “for a pattern of conduct to be accepted as evidence [of genocidal intent], it would have to be such that it could only point to the existence of such intent,” a point echoed in the Court’s 2015 ruling in Croatia vs. Serbia.Footnote37 The Court has emphasized that an interpretation of conduct must align “only” with genocidal intent. This is at odds with much of the social scientific research on genocide, which finds that genocidal intent emerges over time out of a process of cumulative radicalization in shifting political and security conditions, and that intent may be underpinned by a wide variety of motivations (security, territorial conquest, retribution, ethnic purification, and so forth). In any case, the legal threshold for genocidal intent in international courts is so high that in practice it often shields perpetrators from criminal responsibility.Footnote38 Indeed, numerous scholars have detailed how the UNCG was drafted to protect states from legal responsibility.Footnote39
Given this history we should be hesitant to expect that the ICJ will hand down a decision in South Africa vs. Israel that reflects the reality of what is occurring. It is no surprise that prosecutors in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other international courts often pursue charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, which do not include the same criterion of special intent. It is certainly possible that the ICJ will rule that Israel is committing genocide. The ICJ’s provisional measures order in South Africa vs. Israel called for Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip,” and later ordered that, “Israel must immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” using language from the UNCG’s Article II(c).Footnote40 The Court also has before it other cases involving genocide allegations, such as The Gambia vs. Myanmar and Ukraine vs. Russia.Footnote41 Nevertheless, the Court’s operative interpretation of special intentionality suggests we should be cautious in expecting that the ICJ’s decision will accord with the empirical record and analyses produced by a wide range of experts and witnesses.
International humanitarian law (IHL) is also showing its shortcomings. IHL is primarily concerned with placing limitations on violence perpetrated by armed actors, whether state or non-state, occurring during armed conflict. Central to IHL is how to balance the reality of armed conflict and state interests with the moral imperative to protect civilians and prisoners of war, and to this end the law stipulates a set of fundamental principles. These include “humanity,” or protection of life and the limitation of destruction and harm during conflict; “distinction” between combatants and civilians, and between civilian “objects” and military targets; “proportionality” to ensure that the level of violence is commensurate with the objectives; and, “military necessity,” which permits actions directed only toward weakening the military capacity of the opponent, and which cannot violate the other fundamental principles.Footnote42 The goal is to balance the aims of defeating or weakening the enemy with minimizing civilian suffering. These principles are collectively part of IHL: one principle cannot be discarded, such as humanity, in favour of others, such as military necessity.
Nevertheless, this is not how modern IHL is often interpreted by violent states. International humanitarian law’s core principles are frequently reframed in practice to be deferential to state power. Gaza is, once again, a good illustration.Footnote43 In June 2024, the OHCHR issued a report finding Israel responsible for violating “fundamental principles of international humanitarian law on the conduct of hostilities” in its “indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks” in Gaza.Footnote44 Israel’s response was to deny culpability through a narrow reading of the law. Regarding indiscriminate aerial bombing, Israel stated, “in many instances, aerial munitions, including those with a wider area of effect, are the only type of weapon that can accomplish the military objective.”Footnote45 It criticized the OHCHR for a “legal analysis based on the final outcome” of the attacks rather than the internal – and undisclosed – Israeli decision-making process, and for the assumption that “attacking a large number of targets, or using certain munitions, implies a problem with the application of the rules of distinction,” suggesting that large-scale indiscriminate assaults can be militarily justified and thus legally permissible.Footnote46 The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) frequently states that it “conducts precise, intelligence-based” strikes and that “it will continue operating according to international law.”Footnote47 To accusations that it is imposing famine conditions on Gazan civilians, a war crime, the IDF responds that “Israel puts no limits on the amount of aid that can go into Gaza.”Footnote48
In the ICJ case of South Africa vs Israel, Israeli counsel summarized its moral evasion, stating
[it] is not the intent to destroy all or part of a people as such. Israel’s actions in restricting its targeting practices to attack military personnel or objectives in accordance with international humanitarian law in a proportionate manner in each case, as well as its practice of mitigating civilian harm … demonstrate the precise opposite of any possible genocidal intent … Every civilian casualty in this conflict is a human tragedy that demands our compassion. But the Court is not told how many thousands of casualties are in fact militants, how many were killed by Hamas fire, how many were civilians taking direct part in hostilities, and just how many are the result of legitimate and proportionate use of force against military targets, even if tragic … Of course, Israel does not have any right to violate the law, still less to commit genocide – and indeed it does not – but it does have every right to act to defend itself in accordance with the rules and principles of international law. And so it has done.Footnote49
The selective and tendentious reading of IHL appears to be more common among violence-prone liberal democracies such as Israel, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, since they are more sensitive to public accusations of employing raw violence. In response, they create a legal artifice deployed to legitimize state violence, even as it turns the law against itself like an ouroboros. This is evident, for instance, in the US’s stylized interpretations of IHL obligations in the “global war on terror,” which were used to justify torture, enforced disappearances, indiscriminate killings, drone assassinations, and the denial of Geneva Conventions protections to detainees.Footnote51 This logic has been extended to Gaza: in December 2024, the United States pressured the Famine Early Warning System to retract its finding that northern Gaza is at risk of imminent famine in an effort to insulate Israel from war crimes accusations.Footnote52 At the same time, Samantha Power, who, as head of USAID (the government agency tasked with coordinating US humanitarian aid), held a seat on President Biden’s National Security Council, evaded questions over American military support for Israel, instead remarking, “I actually feel really fortunate given the scale of the suffering that I’m in a position to be negotiating, things that I know seem small, maybe next to the scale suffering going on.”Footnote53 The massive legalization of US national security in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks combines the clinical discourse of international humanitarian law with the brutal fist of sovereign violence. As Orna Ben-Naftali, Eitan Diamond, and Aner Shofty have argued,
… legal professionals and institutions employing the language of law have been able to present an onslaught, which so many others consider to be a genocide, as a legitimate, if lamentable, act of self-defence.Footnote54
If IHL and the UNCG are statist in orientation, or least in common interpretation, the category of crimes against humanity is less so. Crimes against humanity refer to serious violations committed in contexts of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population,” and can occur during peace or wartime. The range of criminal actions is wide, and includes murder, rape, slavery, persecution, extermination, apartheid, and torture. The elements of the crime do not, however, include the standard of perpetrator intentionality nor the limited victim categories found in the Genocide Convention. Given that there is no hierarchy of crimes between genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, the latter is especially useful for holding state violators accountable. Nevertheless, even though crimes against humanity are defined in the ICC’s Elements of Crimes and are prohibited under a variety of treaties and customary law, there is no international treaty detailing state obligations, as is the case for genocide and international humanitarian law.Footnote55 A treaty could make a number of contributions, including articulating a comprehensive set of state responsibilities to prevent – and not only punish – such crimes, setting the parameters for extradition, establishing more robust legal protections for witnesses and survivors, and ultimately providing a needed legal touchstone for the adoption of domestic legislation prohibiting such crimes. Given its wider ambit of applicability, a crimes against humanity treaty can potentially overcome some of the limitations of IHL and the UNCG. In a welcome sign, support for such a treaty has grown recently.Footnote56
Another body of law, human rights law, is more expansive than IHL or the UNCG, encompassing a wide range of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. Drawing from and elaborating on the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the nine core international human rights instruments, consisting of a variety of treaties, covenants and optional protocols, codify a range of fundamental universal rights and state obligations that overlap with but go well beyond the narrow protection of civilians from atrocity crimes.Footnote57 The paradox, however, is that the state can suspend many, though not all, recognized human rights obligations under self-declared emergency conditions, whereas international laws concerning war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity are non-derogable.Footnote58 Therein lies a cruel irony: the most expansive bodies of law are the ones most vulnerable to the sovereign’s self-determination of exception. Israel’s long apartheid rule over the Occupied Territories exemplifies the extent and depth of such an institutionalized state of exception.
None of this is to discard the relevance of international law. It should not be jettisoned nor its core normative commitments dismissed as mere power play, if only because there is nothing better to replace it. But law cannot be salvaged merely by looking inwardly at its internal logic; it requires rethinking and assessing the state of global politics and the erosion of those international norms and institutions focused on civilian protection, as well as the breakdown of multilateralism within the UN system. This brings us to our fourth crisis, illustrated by the weakness of the UN’s norm of the responsibility to protect.
Responsibility to Protect
The responsibility to protect (R2P) is an international norm stipulating that states, and the “international community,” are obligated to protect their populations from atrocity crimes. Today, R2P is supposed to be embedded in a broad international atrocity prevention architecture that includes numerous governmental, intergovernmental, and civil society actors.Footnote59 To its defenders, it encapsulates the global promise of “never again.”
The roots of R2P lie in the international failure to arrest the mass slaughter that overtook the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Kosovo in the 1990s. R2P was very much a product of the expansion of the international human rights movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War, as the global order was being refashioned in liberal democratic terms in the wake of the collapse of communism.
The responsibility to protect was an important element of this new thinking. Indeed, in its earlier formulations it was quite audacious. Articulated by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001, it brought together a group of likeminded diplomats and activists to outline a global commitment to protect civilians from
the large-scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is either the product of either deliberate state action, or state neglect or state inability to act, or a failed state situation, or large-scale “ethnic cleansing,” actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.Footnote60
The 2001 ICISS report identified three primary responsibilities to prevent, react, and rebuild after atrocities.Footnote62 Unsurprisingly, the responsibility to react, which included the sharp end of military intervention, would prove the most contentious.
The 2004 UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change’s final report adopted much of the ICISS’s arguments while also arguing that peacebuilding and economic and social development should be understood as part of atrocity prevention.Footnote63 Annan was explicit about this in his preface, writing, “it is essential that due attention and necessary resources be devoted to achieving the Millennium Development Goals,” employing the development framework in use at the UN.Footnote64 But even within this wider ambit, the Panel’s report recognized that the use of force was contentious and it attempted to outline the guidelines for military interventions. The report states,
There is a growing recognition that the issue is not the ‘right to intervene’ of any State, but the ‘responsibility to protect’ of every State when it comes to people suffering from avoidable catastrophe – mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion and terror, and deliberate starvation and exposure to disease.Footnote65
collective international responsibility to protect, exercisable by the Security Council authorizing military intervention as a last resort, in the event of genocide and other large-scale killing, ethnic cleansing or serious violations of international humanitarian law which sovereign Governments have proved powerless or unwilling to prevent.Footnote66
The UN General Assembly (UNGA) endorsed the responsibility to protect at the 2005 UN World Summit, though now largely shorn of the ICISS’s extensive elaboration. Paragraphs 138 and 139 of the UN’s World Summit Outcome Document underscore R2P obligations and reaffirm the basic division of labour on international security, noting that the international community of member states, “through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the [UN] Charter, to help to protect populations,” but that “collective action, in a timely and decisive manner” must happen through the UN Security Council, though “in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate.”Footnote67
The Secretary-General delineated the now well-known “three-pillar” strategy of R2P implementation in 2009.Footnote68 The first pillar establishes that states carry the primary obligation of protecting populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. The second pillar charges the international community with the responsibility to support states in fulfilling this obligation. The third pillar asserts that if a state fails in its duty, the international community must be ready to take collective action, using diplomatic, humanitarian, and other appropriate measures in line with the United Nations Charter.
R2P’s development is often framed as an improvement over the traditional arguments defending humanitarian military intervention that dominated debates in the 1990s, and advocates have generated substantial research and policy work supporting the norm. R2P has been cited in over ninety UN Security Council resolutions on crises and in various topical resolutions on genocide and conflict prevention. The General Assembly has invoked R2P in over thirty-five resolutions, and the UN Human Rights Council has done so eighty times.Footnote69
And yet, R2P has faced several problems, three of which are especially evident at present. The first is that much of the focus on the responsibility to protect within the UN has been on the conceptual elaboration of the norm and not on the practical work of developing regular institutional mechanisms for investigation, evaluation, recommendations, and accountability. The regular UN R2P reports produced by the Secretary-General are a reflection of this problem: they rarely discuss in detail a plan or programme for R2P mainstreaming.Footnote70 There are many reasons for this, but a key point seems to be that the UN leadership has provided little support for a robust R2P beyond symbolic statements, as my colleague Douglas Irvin-Erickson and I have detailed in a recent policy report.Footnote71
The focus on conceptual elaboration over practical implementation mechanisms highlights a second problem, namely that the crucial 1st and 2nd pillars that emphasize prevention (including preventing the structural causes of atrocities) rather than intervention, are underdeveloped and largely ignored. Pillars 1 and 2 in fact could be employed for a much more radical rethinking of national and global obligations, since any serious commitment to addressing the root causes of mass violence would entail some engagement with addressing material poverty and inequality, as well as regional and global systems of economic and political exploitation. To be sure, the UN system is not the only venue for doing this kind of work – international discourse around “development,” for example, is often ameliorative rather than transformative – but the point remains that the first two pillars could offer an entry into these discussions through the discourse of national and global responsibility, especially given that R2P was endorsed by the General Assembly in 2005.
The third problem, unsurprisingly, concerns the third pillar of “timely and decisive response by the international community.” The practical understanding of R2P within the UN has become narrower and centred on the hard edge of military force, even if formal UN documents repeatedly highlight the importance of attending to structural causes of violence. Decolonial thinkers like Siddharth Mallavarapu and Mahmood Mamdani have condemned R2P as little more than a tool for western domination washed through the legitimizing discourse of human rights.Footnote72 Jeremy Moses shows how R2P-inflected discourse often makes dubiously clear distinctions between the liberal democratic defenders of human rights and authoritarian regimes that perpetrate mass atrocities, and moreover how it can be used as a legitimizing concept for unending humanitarian wars of salvation.Footnote73
These and other criticisms highlight the moral hypocrisy of an ethical discourse that may function to project state power. Critics caution using military intervention, especially when it is driven by western powers, and instead endorse a clear preference for resolving conflicts through multilateral diplomacy that avoids military means and prioritizes development-focused strategies for atrocity prevention.Footnote74 The criticisms were especially evident during the 2011 Libya crisis, when the UN Security Council (UNSC) authorized military force against Libya as President Muammar Gaddafi’s troops threatened a massacre in Benghazi. The UNSC resolution initially received wide support, but that evaporated as NATO’s military campaign continued. The case of Libya soured many countries on R2P, and if anything reinforced the longstanding accusations of countries like Cuba and Russia that R2P was partisan – even as Russia invoked R2P in its 2008 attack on Georgia.
While this critique of R2P as a potential neocolonial tool is compelling in some ways, it is also incomplete, as it minimizes the significant contributions of Global South researchers, activists, and governments to R2P’s development over the past two decades, a point noted by decolonial scholar Coralie Pison Hindawi.Footnote75 Diplomats and governments in South Africa, Nigeria, and Algeria have been central to contesting, shaping, and strengthening R2P, especially the second pillar, and regional actors like ECOWAS and the African Union have used R2P or similar concepts at various times.Footnote76 Many Latin American activists and some governments played an important early role in attempting to expand the set of protections laid out in the norm, and today there are a large number of R2P networks that include Global South countries.Footnote77 Many of these efforts complicate the assumption that the western military powers are the inherent defenders of human rights or sole advocates of R2P, and instead they seek to refine and advance the norm to safeguard it from potential misuse. In short, to characterize R2P as merely a tool of powerful western states ignores the substantial insights and elaborations of the norm carried out by some Global South actors.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt R2P is in dire straits, like the international atrocity prevention architecture more generally.Footnote78 The perception that R2P is primarily about the use of military force remains strong, regardless of pillars 1 and 2. In a strict sense R2P does not expand powers in the UN Charter’s Chapter VII, which places authority to determine when and how to use force in the Security Council.Footnote79 But this may be beside the point. Alex Bellamy notes, “today, R2P is widely considered too controversial to be used as a vehicle for either activism, practice, or institutional reform aimed at protecting vulnerable populations from atrocity crimes.”Footnote80 For many governments and critics, R2P is about military intervention.
Remaining support had declined well before 7 October, as the violence in Libya, Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine, Yemen, and elsewhere have gone unchecked. But Gaza has no doubt solidified its marginalization, or in any case revealed its current irrelevance. It is notable that R2P has not served as a significant rallying point for responding to the Gaza genocide; some human rights organizations have issued a number of sharp statements and analyses referring to R2P, but this remains a minority position.Footnote81
It is thus not surprising that some critics have argued that R2P is unsalvageable. Reflecting on Gaza, Jeremy Moses writes,
While in the past I have suggested that a pacifist ethos could help to bring R2P in line with its universal claims, I no longer believe this to be a useful ambition. After Gaza, the R2P no longer represents a viable normative agenda for humanitarianism in general, as the burden of its unbreakable association with the military power of the United States and NATO is now more evident than ever.Footnote82
Both Jeremy Moses and Alex Bellamy emphasize that R2P is primarily a political norm, not only a moral and legal one. Gaza has clearly shown this political dimension, as if this reminder were needed once again. And yet one of the problematic consequences of the professionalization of high-level atrocity prevention and response has been the focus on abstract normative development and the fine-tuning of technical expertise and “toolboxes,” without explicitly confronting the issues of asymmetric political power and the inherent ethical dilemmas at the heart of prevention and response work – a point, it should be noted, that bedevils much professional peacebuilding work.Footnote84 These limitations of R2P as a norm in turn speak to the decline of multilateralism as a practice in international atrocity prevention.
Multilateralism and Atrocity Prevention
Multilateralism is undoubtedly a fraught term; it is simultaneously a prized concept in international diplomacy about the willingness of countries to work together peacefully toward a common end, and also a term pilloried by critics as cover for the exercise of rough power on prone states. No doubt, multilateralism is used strategically to advance narrow interests – such as the US “coalition of the willing” during the Iraq War – but at its core the concept points to the need to collectively address problems that cannot be resolved by individual states. Atrocity prevention in particular benefits from multilateralism to ensure the broad legitimacy necessary for dealing with such pressing challenges. But if R2P signalled an aspirational highpoint of multilateral action, the present moment reveals multilateralism’s nadir.
Multilateralism in the UN has eroded significantly, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and then with Gaza, and the short and midterm prospects for multilateral peacebuilding and atrocity prevention are dim. The UNSC’s permanent three members of China, Russia, and the United States have effectively gutted the ability of the UN to address severe atrocity situations where doing so impinges on their interests, which is not surprising given their complicity in a number of atrocities.Footnote85 The Secretariat has proven incapable of preventing the erosion of multilateralism, often finding itself at a loss on how to navigate the competing interests of powerful states while preserving the modest accomplishments it can claim.
The ambitious UN Summit of the Future held in September 2024 was meant to re-energize multilateralism.Footnote86 The Summit resulted in the “inter-governmentally negotiated, action-oriented” Pact for the Future, which laid out nearly 60 commitments along several themes.Footnote87 Fifteen of these commitments concerned international peace and security, and included “actions” such as protecting all civilians in armed conflict (action 14); ensuring humanitarian aid reaches civilians (action 15); promoting cooperation and understanding among states, defusing tensions, and pursuing peaceful settlements of disputes (action 16); and complying with and upholding the decisions of the International Court of Justice (action 17), among others. But the Pact is long on aspirations and short on enforcement mechanisms. Most of these actions depend on the Security Council for implementation, but the US, Russia or China will certainly veto or ignore these prescriptions whenever they conflict with their interests. The United States has vetoed or stymied any substantive UNSC action on Israel while continuing to send weapons used in the butchery of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. China bristles at an OHCHR report holding it responsible for atrocities against Uyghurs and other minorities, while Russia simply ignores UN principles and the ICJ in furthering its genocidal campaign in Ukraine.Footnote88
Regional intergovernmental organizations are also showing the limits of multilateralism. The European Union’s support for Ukraine has been weakened by the rise of far-right parties and growing exhaustion with the war, while the Organization of American States has proven incapable of addressing crises in Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The African Union has been unable to dampen armed conflicts in Sudan, the horn of Africa, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Libya, or the spread of authoritarianism across the Sahel, while the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been especially weak on atrocity prevention, evident in its failure to pressure Myanmar over its violent repression of numerous ethnic groups, including the Rohingya.Footnote89
Certainly, many states remain invested in multilateralism and support the Pact for the Future, often the same states that support the responsibility to protect.Footnote90 Small states in particular have played a central role in advocating for international law and cooperation in peacebuilding, development, and tackling climate change.Footnote91 These states remain committed to the international system precisely because they face challenges at a scale and level of complexity that are impossible to address individually, but also because they realize that a global order without a system of rules would only endanger them. And some have occasionally taken leadership roles: when the UNSC was deadlocked on Gaza, Malta was instrumental in organizing support to advance Resolution 2712 in November 2023 to establish humanitarian access to civilians. Liechtenstein successfully lobbied for a General Assembly resolution demanding a suspension of weapons deliveries to Myanmar after the 2021 coup, and also succeeded in passing a resolution requiring the General Assembly to meet within ten days whenever a Security Council permanent member (P5) casts a veto in the UNSC, a move that was hailed as a sign of the strength of coalitional power in UNGA and broad disgust with the UNSC’s permanent members.
But their space for maneuver is constrained by China, Russia, and the United States. While these and other initiatives are certainly welcome, they have not significantly impacted the intractability of UNSC behaviour on dealing with atrocities. One option is to expand the number of permanent members on the Security Council, a long-running demand by countries across the Global South, especially Brazil, South Africa, and India. More recently, Sierra Leone has pushed for this and garnered some surprising support, including from the Biden administration (though the US opposes extending the veto to any additional permanent seat).Footnote92 This may be a worthy goal, especially since the UNSC permanent members are the legacy of a post-World War II politics that does not reflect the current world. Nevertheless, it is not evident how enlarging the permanent membership, especially if this includes the veto power, would improve the efficacy of the Security Council in carrying out its mandate to ensure international peace and stability. The spoiler problem that haunts the Security Council would only be amplified among a larger number of countries, especially when an atrocity case affects their national self-interest.
The best outcome would be to eliminate the veto, but this is unlikely given the obstacles. A more plausible yet still impactful approach is to place limits on the use of vetoes for certain classes of issues that come before the UNSC, such as imminent or ongoing atrocities situations. Jennifer Trahan has persuasively detailed how the legality of the veto can be challenged.Footnote93 More specifically, one possible way to circumvent the veto stranglehold is to rethink the uses of the General Assembly’s Resolution 377A, known as the “Uniting for Peace” resolution. The text states:
that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.Footnote94
The reason for turning to the General Assembly is not because it is naturally more concerned with peace and justice than the Security Council – obviously, it can suffer from collective action problems and spoilers – but rather because at the present this is where the centre of gravity for atrocity prevention and response is found, particularly in the various member states’ “friends” networks like the Global Network of R2P Focal Points, the European Network of R2P Focal Points, Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes, the Latin American Network for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, Group of Friends of the Responsibility to Protect, and so forth.
This venue is not a panacea, certainly, and we should remain wary of placing too much hope in the UN’s peacebuilding abilities or its will to respond; it is by now well established that peacebuilding work cannot be implemented solely top-down if it is to succeed.Footnote96 But the collapse of multilateralism has placed enormous roadblocks in securing the conditions to prevent, ameliorate, and end mass atrocities around the world, and international legitimacy and coordination is a necessary component of response. And, once again, Gaza serves as a synecdoche for this crisis, as the pathologies and failures of multilateralism are crystallized in the suffering of the Gazan people.
Conclusion
This article outlined a series of related crises, ranging from the immediate crisis of Gaza to a series of cascading and widening crises that run through genocide research, the law, global norms for civilian protection, and the practices of powerful countries. These crises are rooted in profound harms. The present moment, one of enormous suffering for some and indifference for others, is also one of tremendous despair over the failures of our leaders and institutions to arrest shocking levels of carnage around the world. The fury that has been unleashed upon Gazans, and Palestinians more generally, is also found in numerous other places, even if the specifics may differ. And with such fury come trauma, dispossession, and broken lives that will not easily mend after the killings stop.
Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet, returned repeatedly in his work to the pain of violence and exile that still echoes in the present. Reflecting on the legacy of displacement and destruction, and the longing for home, he wrote,
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Ernesto Verdeja
Ernesto Verdeja is Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Keough School of Global Affairs, and concurrent Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, United States. His current research focuses on the causes and prevention of genocide and mass atrocities. He also regularly consults with governments and human rights organizations on genocide and atrocity prevention, and on transitional justice. His research can be found at everdeja.weebly.com.
Notes
1 Mahmoud Darwish, “Exile,” in If I Were Another (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2009), 166.
2 Haaretz Editorial Board, “Netanyahu's Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza Is on Display for All to See,” 10 November 2024; Crispian Balmer, “Former Israeli Defense Minister Yaalon Warns of Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza,” Reuters, 1 December 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/former-israeli-defense-minister-yaalon-warns-ethnic-cleansing-gaza-2024-12-01/.
3 Francesca Albanese, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” General Assembly, A/79/384, 1 October 2024, https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n24/279/68/pdf/n2427968.pdf.
4 Francesca Albanese, “Anatomy of a Genocide,” Human Rights Council, A/HRC/55/73, 25 March 2024, paragraph 7, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session55/advance-versions/a-hrc-55-73-auv.pdf.
5 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Gaza is ‘running out of time’ UN experts warn, demanding a ceasefire to prevent genocide,” 2 November 2023, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/gaza-running-out-time-un-experts-warn-demanding-ceasefire-prevent-genocide; Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, “IPC Famine Review Committee Alert: Gaza Strip,” 8 November 2024, https://www.ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ipcinfo/docs/IPC_FRC_Alert_Gaza_Nov2024.pdf.
6 UNICEF, “Statement by UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell on a deadly weekend of attacks in North Gaza,” 2 November 2024, https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/statement-unicef-executive-director-catherine-russell-deadly-weekend-attacks-north.
7 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war,” 20 November 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/11/un-special-committee-finds-israels-warfare-methods-gaza-consistent-genocide?utm_source=The+New+Humanitarian&utm_campaign=007e1f657a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_Cheat_Sheet_15_11&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d842d98289-007e1f657a-75439233; Amnesty International, “Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territory: ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” 5 December 2024, available at https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/; Human Rights Watch, “Extermination and Acts of Genocide,” 19 December 2024, available at https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/19/extermination-and-acts-genocide/israel-deliberately-depriving-palestinians-gaza.
8 UN Secretary-General, “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan: Report of the Secretary-General”, UN doc. A/78/554, 25 October 2023; Oren Ziv, “‘It’s Like 1948’: Israel Cleanses Vast West Bank Region of Nearly all Palestinians,” +972 Magazine, 31 August 2023.
9 See B’tselem, “Ten Israeli human rights organizations to ICC Prosecutor: We are all committed to assisting your office in advancing the ongoing investigation of the Situation in Palestine,” 28 December 2022, https://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20221228_10_ngos_to_icc_prosecutor_we_are_all_committed_to_assisting_your_officein_advancing_the_ongoing_investigation_of_the_situation_in_palestine.
10 B’tselem, “Not a Vibrant Democracy: This is Apartheid,” October 2022, https://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/202210_not_a_vibrant_democracy_this_is_apartheid_eng.pdf’; Amnesty International, “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity,” February 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/; Human Rights Watch, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” 27 April 2021, https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution. International Court of Justice, “Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Including East Jerusalem,” 19 July 2024, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/186/186-20240719-adv-01-00-en.pdf. Also see the earlier ICJ Advisory Opinion, “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” 9 July 2004, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/131/131-20040709-ADV-01-00-EN.pdf.
11 Rabea Eghbariah, “Toward Nakba as Legal Concept,” Columbia Law Review 124, no. 4 (2024), https://columbialawreview.org/content/toward-nakba-as-a-legal-concept/.
12 Raz Segal and Luigi Daniele, “Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism: Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Unprecedented Crisis to Unprecedented Change,” Journal of Genocide Research, 5 March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2325804; Omar McDoom, “Expert Commentary, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and the Question of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research, 25 April 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2346403; Amos Goldberg, “The Problematic Return of Intent,” Journal of Genocide Research, 15 October 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2413175.
13 Abdelwahab El-Affendi, “The Futility of Genocide Studies After Gaza,” Journal of Genocide Research, 18 January 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2305525.
14 United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” 9 December 1948, https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf.
15 Adam Jones, “Scholarly Definitions,” Genocide (New York: Routledge, 2017), 23–27.
16 Goldberg, “The Problematic Return of Intent.”
17 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Murder and Persecution of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995); Robert Melson, “The Armenian Genocide as Precursor and Prototype of Twentieth-Century Genocide,” in Is The Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan Rosenbaum (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).
18 Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken, 1989).
19 Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
20 Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses, eds., Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Alan Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique?, see note 17.
21 Damien Short and Haifa Rashed, “Palestine,” in Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death, and Ecocide, ed. Damien Short (London: Zed Books, 2016); Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, eds., The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
22 Segal and Daniele, “Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism.”
23 Raz Segal, “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” Jewish Currents, 13 October 2023, https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide.
24 See “Public Statement: Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza,” OpinioJuris, International Commission of Jurists, 18 October 2023, https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/18/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potential-genocide-in-gaza/.
25 “Scholars of the Holocaust Condemn Hamas Terror and Denounce the Rise of Global Antisemitism,” accessed 10 October 2024, https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfM8f78BT77iwUO4B-82YKWTsVOpvR_zcSIJxTlLJJYP99yKw/viewform?fbclid=IwAR0bcD4UBjPWOKESkkoxvt5sbu5ZVwqH8M8vrVOfgMUwNKOGrDonMPTIkRo.
26 “Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October,” Contending Modernities, 9 December 2023, https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/statement-of-scholars-7-october/.
27 See Omer Bartov, “Omer Bartov – Israel Guilty of Genocide, Ethnic-cleansing; US Totally Complicit; Israel Could Implode,” The Wire, 4 October 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjShVWKN_-M.
28 Goldberg, “The Problematic Return of Intent.”
29 McDoom, “Expert Commentary, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and the Question of Genocide.”
30 Albanese, “Anatomy of a genocide;” Albanese, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967: Genocide as Colonial Erasure.”
31 Israel Charny, “Leading Genocide Scholar Israel Charny on Gaza War,” Genocide Watch, 2 February 2024, https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/leading-genocide-scholar-israel-charny-on-gaza-war; American Jewish Committee, “5 Reasons Why the Events in Gaza are not ‘Genocide’,” 23 November 2023, https://www.ajc.org/news/5-reasons-why-the-events-in-gaza-are-not-genocide.
32 On the Israeli peace movement, see Atalia Omer, When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
33 A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster, eds., Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence in the Contemporary World (London: Routledge, 2020).
34 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “‘The international order is breaking down in Gaza’: UN experts mark one year of genocidal attacks on Palestinians,” 11 October 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2024/10/international-order-breaking-down-gaza-un-experts-mark-one-year-genocidal.
35 United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
36 Payam Akhavan, Reducing Genocide to Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Ernesto Verdeja, “Genocide: Debating Definitions,” in Responding to Genocide: The Politics of International Action, eds. Adam Lupel and Ernesto Verdeja (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013), 21–46.
37 International Court of Justice, “Application of The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro) – Judgment,” 26 February 2007, para. 373, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/91/091-20070226-JUD-01-00-EN.pdf; International Court of Justice, “Application of The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Croatia v. Serbia) – Judgment,” 3 February 2015, paras. 146–148, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/118/118-20150203-JUD-01-00-EN.pdf.
38 Jennifer Balint, Genocide, State Crime, and the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 23–26.
39 Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Moses, The Problems of Genocide; Randle C. DeFalco, Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
40 International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) – Provisional Measures, Order,” 26 January 2024, paras. 79, 86(3), https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203447; International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) – Request for the Modification of the Order of 28 March 2024, Order,” 24 May 2024, para. 57, https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204091.
41 International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide (The Gambia v. Myanmar) – Application Instituting Proceedings and Request for Provisional Measures,” 11 November 2019, https://www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/178/178-20191111-APP-01-00-EN.pdf; International Court of Justice, “Allegations of Genocide under the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide (Ukraine v. Russian Federation) – Application Instituting Proceedings,” 27 February 2022, https://www.icj-cij.org/case/182/institution-proceedings.
42 International Committee of the Red Cross, “Fundamentals Principles of International Humanitarian Law,” https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/fundamental-principles-ihl.
43 Camila Boisen, “Israel’s Punitive War In Gaza,” Journal of Genocide Research, 26 September 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2406098.
44 OHCHR, “Thematic Report: Indiscriminate and Disproportionate Attacks During The Conflict in Gaza,” 19 June 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/opt/20240619-ohchr-thematic-report-indiscrim-disprop-attacks-gaza-oct-dec2023.pdf.
45 Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations, “Israel’s Initial Response to the OHCHR Background Note,” New York, June 2024, 7, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/opt/israel-initial-response-ohchr-background-note-june2024.pdf.
46 Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations, 1.
47 Israel Defense Forces, “Press Briefing by IDF Spokesperson RAdm. Daniel Hagari,” 6 June 2024, https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/israel-at-war/briefings-by-idf-spokesperson-rear-admiral-daniel-hagari/june-24-press-briefings/press-briefing-by-idf-spokesperson-radm-daniel-hagari-june-6-2024/.
48 Emmanuel Fabian, “US seeks probe of Gaza aid stampede; IDF ‘tried to disperse mob’ that ambushed trucks,” Times of Israel, 1 March 2024, https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-pushes-for-probe-into-gaza-aid-stampede-israel-says-troops-tried-to-disperse-mob/.
49 International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) – Verbatim Record,” 12 January 2024, para. 41, 69, https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203424.
50 Nida Al-Mughrabi, “Dozens killed and wounded in Israeli strikes across Gaza, medics say,” Reuters, 17 November 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/tens-killed-wounded-israeli-strike-residential-building-gazas-beit-lahiya-medics-2024-11-17/.
51 See Amnesty International, “Iraq: 20 years since the US-led coalition invaded Iraq, impunity reigns supreme,” 20 March 2023, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/03/iraq-20-years-since-the-us-led-coalition-invaded-iraq-impunity-reigns-supreme/; Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2021).
52 Ellen Knickmeyer, “The US Says It Pushed a Retraction of a Famine Warning for North Gaza; Aid Groups Express Concern,” AP News, 26 December 2024, https://apnews.com/article/gaza-israel-famine-biden-trump-fews-89b4a0d3ab684669ee4456566b406621.
53 Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, “Humanitarian Superstar Samantha Power Admits Gaza is a Loss,” Responsible Statecraft, 19 December 2024, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/samantha-power-gaza-2670499374/.
54 Orna Ben-Naftali, Eitan Diamond and Aner Shofty, “Esprit des Corpse: Genocide in the Shadowland of Gaza?” Journal of Genocide Research, 25 October 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2418670.
55 International Criminal Court, Elements of Crimes, The Hague, 2013, https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/Publications/Elements-of-Crimes.pdf.; Secretary-General, “Report on Crimes Against Humanity,” A/78/717, 12 January 2024, https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n24/013/69/pdf/n2401369.pdf.
56 Leila Nadya Sadat and Akila Radhakrishnan, “Justice Delayed is Justice Denied,” Just Security, 23 October 2024, https://www.justsecurity.org/104188/justice-delayed-denied-crimes-against-humanity-treaty/; Richard Dicker, “Moving Ahead to a Crimes Against Humanity Treaty,” Opinio Juris, 19 December 2024, https://opiniojuris.org/2024/12/19/moving-ahead-to-a-crimes-against-humanity-treaty/.
57 See OHCHR, “The Core International Human Rights Instruments and their Monitoring Bodies,” United Nations, n.d., https://www.ohchr.org/en/core-international-human-rights-instruments-and-their-monitoring-bodies.
58 See Article 4 (1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and more generally https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/SlidesChapter16.pdf.
59 Jeffrey Bachman, The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022).
60 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect, 2001, xii, https://r2pasiapacific.org/files/292/ICISS%20Report.pdf.
61 Kofi Annan, “We the Peoples: the role of the United Nations in the twenty-first century,” Report of the Secretary-General of the UN, 2000, UN Doc. A/54/2000.
62 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect, https://r2pasiapacific.org/files/292/ICISS%20Report.pdf
63 High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, Final Report, A/59/565, December 2004, https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/gaA.59.565_En.pdf.
64 Ibid., para. 7.
65 Ibid., para. 201.
66 Ibid., para. 203.
67 General Assembly, World Summit Outcome Document, A/Res/601/1, 24 October 2005, para. 139.
68 Secretary-General, Implementing the Responsibility to Protect, A/63/677, 12 January 2009.
69 Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at https://www.globalr2p.org/resources/.
70 Secretary-General, “Responsibility to Protect: The Commitment to Prevent and Protect Populations from Atrocity Crimes,” United Nations: New York NY. A/78/901-S/2024/434, 3 June 2024.
71 Douglas Irvin-Erickson and Ernesto Verdeja, “An Assessment of the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect,” Stimson Center, 3 December 2024, https://www.stimson.org/2024/an-assessment-of-the-un-office-on-genocide-prevention-and-the-responsibility-to-protect/.
72 Siddharth Mallavarapu, “Colonialism and the Responsibility to Protect,” in Theorizing the Responsibility to Protect, ed. Ramesh Thakur and William Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 305–322; Mahmood Mamdani, “Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish?” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 4, no. 1 (2010): 53–67.
73 Jeremy Moses, “Gaza and the Political and Moral Failure of the Responsibility to Protect,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 16 February 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2024.2304987.
74 Monica Serrano and Thomas Weiss (eds.), The International Politics of Human Rights: Rallying to the R2P Cause? (London: Routledge, 2014), 107–128.
75 Coralie Pison Hindawi, “Decolonizing the Responsibility to Protect: On Pervasive Eurocentrism, Southern Agency and Struggles over Universals,” Security Dialogue 53, no.1 (2022): 38–56.
76 Kwesi Aning and Flifli Edu-Afful, “African Agency in R2P: Interventions by African Union and ECOWAS in Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, and Libya,” International Studies Review 18, no. 1 (2016): 120–133; Jennifer Welsh, “Norm Contestation and the Responsibility to Protect,” Global Responsibility to Protect 5, no. 4 (2013): 365–396.
77 See International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect, the Global Network of R2P Focal Points, the Latin American Network for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, and Group of Friends of the Responsibility to Protect.
78 Matthew Levinger, “Revivifying the Responsibility to Protect: Strengthening the Normative Consensus for Atrocity Prevention,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 18, no. 1 (2024): 190–211.
79 Alex Bellamy, “The Discomforts of Politics: What Future for Atrocity Prevention?” Just Security, 31 October 2023, https://www.justsecurity.org/89832/the-discomforts-of-politics-what-future-for-atrocity-prevention/.
80 Ibid.
81 Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, “Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” Populations at Risk, 1 December 2024, https://www.globalr2p.org/countries/israel-and-the-occupied-palestinian-territory/.
82 Jeremy Moses, “Gaza and the Political and Moral Failure of the Responsibility to Protect,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 18, no. 2 (2024): 211–215.
83 This was evident in our interviews with peacebuilders and UN officials, see Irvin-Erickson and Verdeja, “An Assessment of the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.”
84 Ernesto Verdeja, “Critical Genocide Studies and Mass Atrocity Prevention,” Genocide Studies and Prevention, 13 no. 3 (2019): 111–127; Catherine Goetze, The Distinction of Peace: A Social Analysis of Peacebuilding (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017); Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Douglas Irvin-Erickson, and Ernesto Verdeja, Wicked Problems: The Ethics of Action for Peace, Rights, and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
85 Federica D’Alessandra, “Conceptualizing Great Power Perpetrators,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 18, no. 1 (2024): 151–189.
86 UN Summit of the Future, https://www.un.org/en/summit-of-the-future.
87 UN General Assembly, “Pact for the Future,” A/Res/79/1, September 2024. https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/sotf-the-pact-for-the-future.pdf.
88 High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China,” August 2022, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/2022-08-31/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf.
89 VOA News, “Laos ASEAN summit to focus on Myanmar crisis,” 7 October 2024, https://www.voanews.com/a/laos-asean-summit-to-focus-on-myanmar-crisis/7813461.html.
90 Most of the major supporters of multilateralism are small countries. See the Sustainable Development Report’s “2024 Index of Countries’ Support to UN-Based Multilateralism,” (UN-MI), https://dashboards.sdgindex.org/chapters.
91 Adam Lupel, Kaewkamol Pitakdumrongkit, and Joel Ng, “Small States and the Multilateral System: Transforming Global Governance for a Better Future,” International Peace Institute, September 2024, https://www.ipinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Small-States-and-the-Multilateral-System-web.pdf.
92 Security Council Report, “High-level Debate,” 9 August 2024, https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/whatsinblue/2024/08/high-level-debate-on-addressing-the-historical-injustice-and-enhancing-africas-effective-representation-on-the-un-security-council.php. Also https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/world/africa/us-un-security-council-africa-permanent-seats.html.
93 Jennifer Trahan, Existing Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
94 General Assembly, Resolution 377A, November 1950, para. A1. https://documents.un.org/doc/resolution/gen/nr0/059/75/pdf/nr005975.pdf.
95 “United Nations Charter,” 26 June 1945, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text.
96 Lisa Schirch, Strategic Peacebuilding (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2004); Pamina Firchow, Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation After War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Robert Ricigliano, Making Peace Last (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2012); Severine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
97 Darwish, “Exile,” 169.
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The Gaza Genocide in Five Crises
I will write: Creator of Death, leave me alone for a while … let me beFootnote1
The Israeli annihilation of Gaza that began on 7 October 2023 has illuminated the ways in which power, law, and norms operate in global human rights discourse. The unrelenting violence throws into relief the tensions in global governance and human rights protection norms, forcing us to confront – once again – the nature of international law, the responsibility to protect (R2P) norm, and atrocity prevention more broadly. What crimes are worthy of global attention? And what crimes are not? What are the consequences of this reckoning for the field of genocide studies? What remains of R2P, international law, and multilateral atrocity prevention in this new global configuration? If these questions suggest, on the hand, a weary kind of Nietzschean eternal return where we are condemned to repeat the same debates in the shadow of the same suffering, they also underscore in their pressing immediacy how fragile the current moment is for human rights and civilian protection.
This article examines these issues as a series of cascading crises that have been amplified by the immediate genocidal crisis facing Gazans. It discusses five crises: the crisis in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, particularly Gaza; in Genocide and Holocaust studies; in international law; in the United Nations’ (UN) responsibility to protect norm; and in international multilateral atrocity prevention efforts. These are of course not the only crises of note; there are many more we could identify. But they illustrate the scope of issues that Gaza has brought to the surface of genocide research, international criminal law, and contemporary atrocity prevention praxis. Referring to them as crises highlights, moreover, the urgent attention they require from scholars and prevention practitioners. And certainly, the Gazan genocide is not the sole driver of these crises – they have longer and more profound roots – but Gaza brings to the surface a rippling effect of crises in the global order, even if many were evident in various forms well before 7 October.
I begin with a brief overview of the most immediate crisis, the genocide itself, and then widen the scope to consider how Gaza has shed light on the tensions and limitations of scholarship, law, and policy.
The Gaza Genocide as a Pivotal Moment
The most concrete crisis is the one engulfing Gazans and all Palestinians. The 7 October abductions and slaughter of Israelis and foreigners by Hamas and its allies mark a major inflection point between Israel and the occupied Palestinian people. Those horrific attacks, clearly a violation of international humanitarian law, were reciprocated with a massive military campaign by the Israeli state which, as of this writing, has taken the lives of over 45,000 people and subjected the entire Gazan population to mass bombings, starvation, disease, displacement, the razing of infrastructure, and unrelenting psychological terror. The campaign has been brutal even by Israeli military standards, combining indiscriminate lethal violence with exterminationist discourse; indeed, even some Israeli voices have condemned the violence. A November 2024 editorial in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz stated that “Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza is on display for all to see,” and in December a former Israeli defense minister and general, Moshe Yaalon, condemned Israeli military crimes and warned that the campaign seeks “to conquer, to annex, to carry out ethnic cleansing,” a startling accusation from a hawkish voice.Footnote2
More notably, the alarm over genocide has been raised by human rights experts since nearly the beginning of Israel’s assault. In October 2023, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Palestine reported to the UN Human Rights Council that the military campaign amounted to “genocide as colonial erasure,”Footnote3 and in March 2024, the Special Rapporteur reported that
there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. More broadly, they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signaling a tragedy foretold.Footnote4
That November, a UN Special Committee of experts found that Israel’s methods are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palestinians there”; soon afterwards, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch declared genocide is occurring.Footnote7 These and numerous other findings by human rights experts point to the genocidal nature of Israel’s campaign.
Of course, the campaign occurs against the backdrop not only of the 7 October massacres but in the shadow of Israel’s ongoing systemic repression of the Palestinian people, sanctioned by a history of discriminatory regulations. This repression is underpinned by distinct logics of national security, territorial control, and ethnonationalist supremacy that have functioned to legitimize Israeli domination over Palestinians. Today those logics reinforce one another to justify the ongoing campaign. The complex web of injustice spun by the desire for security, territory, and supremacy has changed over time, combining structural, cultural, epistemic, and direct forms of violence in various configurations, but broadly includes forced population displacement, land theft and resettlement by Israeli Jewish citizens, the destruction of Palestinian homes and places of cultural, religious, and educational significance, exploitation of natural resources, arbitrary arrest, torture, restrictions on movement, physical and psychological fragmentation of Palestinian communities, and mass and individual killings.Footnote8
Notably, human rights groups have long called for the dismantlement of this system.Footnote9 The Israeli human rights organization B’tselem and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have referred to this as apartheid. Most recently, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), found that Israel’s 58-year occupation of Palestinian territories violates international human rights law.Footnote10 This landmark determination on the occupation by the primary judicial body of the UN reaffirms in no uncertain terms the illegality of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian civilians, though the violations of Palestinians are not limited to the formal occupied territories.Footnote11
Nevertheless, this current and explicitly genocidal phase of violence, different qualitatively from earlier Israeli military operations in terms of scope, intention, and destructiveness, marks a crisis moment for all Palestinians under Israeli state control. Israel seeks a Carthaginian peace. This is a pivotal moment for Palestinians and Israelis, even if the long-term consequences remain unclear. Furthermore, making sense of this moment, how to conceptualize and term it, has in turn created a crisis for the field of Genocide and Holocaust studies, which has historically largely shied away from examining the plight of Palestinian civilians.
Genocide and Holocaust Studies
Raz Segal, Luigi Daniele, Omar McDoom, and Amos Goldberg, among others, have noted in this forum how the Gaza genocide has raised profound challenges for Genocide and Holocaust studies, as the genocide poses unsettling questions over the moral status of victims and justifications of sovereign violence.Footnote12 Abdelwahab El-Affendi has even referred to the “futility of genocide studies after Gaza.”Footnote13 To understand this crisis, it is necessary to examine the field’s origins and dominant frames of reference.
The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) defines genocide as any of a specific set of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”Footnote14 Although the definition has been sharply criticized by experts for a variety of reasons, a few of which I discuss in Part 3, the point is that genocide broadly refers to the intentional targeting of a civilian group for destruction, whether wholly or partly. Most subsequent definitions used by scholars have incorporated these fundamental elements of intentional group destruction.Footnote15 Even so, as the field of comparative genocide research emerged and coalesced in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the Holocaust that set the standard, whether explicitly or not, for what could be appropriately labelled a genocide.Footnote16 To the extent that a given case conformed to the defining elements of the Holocaust as then understood – such as an exterminationist ideology rooted in fantasies of racial purity, the categorical targeting of Jews because of their identity, the use of highly modern techniques of destruction, and the deployment of a rational and preexisting plan of extermination during total war – it could plausibly qualify as a genocide. Some of those elements, like a preexisting plan, have been disproven or significantly revised by subsequent research, but the special place of the Holocaust remained in place in comparative research.Footnote17
In this sense, the Holocaust was seen as the fullest expression of genocidal violence, and thus unique. But “uniqueness” was never straightforward, and actually functioned at several distinct analytical registers. The first was empirical, and concerns the specific dynamics, patterns, and scope of violence among other observable phenomena. In empirical terms, the Holocaust no doubt has elements of uniqueness and similarity with other cases, by now thoroughly studied. But the uniqueness debate also unfolded on a normative register. It dealt with how to understand the evil of the Holocaust, and included at least two general areas of inquiry, ontology and epistemology. The ontological questions revolved around whether the Holocaust is uniquely or more profoundly evil compared to other genocides or episodes of mass suffering, and if so, what makes it exceptionally evil (or, in a variation of this, how does the Holocaust redefine the grammar of evil).Footnote18
The second element was epistemic: how can we make sense of such a caesura in our understanding of the world? Is the world morally intelligible after the Holocaust?Footnote19 These debates in turn posed questions over the nature of modernity, the existence and intentions of God, the relation between “civilization” and barbarism, and the relative normative status of other monstrous harms like the colonial and postcolonial genocides of indigenous peoples, the Atlantic slave trade, Marxist genocides, and so forth. Throughout this, the Holocaust often remained the touchstone for normative theorizing about genocide.
Nevertheless, as comparative empirical work on genocide grew in the 1990s and afterwards, genocide studies emerged as a separate though related field of research that largely reframed the Holocaust as one of several genocides, empirically distinct in important ways but also showing some similarities. For comparativists or researchers examining other cases, the Holocaust was no longer the defining measure of what was and was not a genocide.Footnote20 As genocide studies expanded and drew away from Holocaust studies, the old debates around the normative uniqueness of the Holocaust receded, even while remaining an anchor point for those scholars, research and teaching centres, journals, and museums focused on the Holocaust.
Gaza has brought these somewhat dormant tensions over the appropriateness of comparability back to the surface, but now refracted in new ways. Although the violent repression of Palestinians is, of course, well-known, it has not been central to genocide research outside of the work of scholars working on the intersection of genocide and settler colonialism or who are specialists on Palestine-Israel.Footnote21 But the Gaza genocide now appears to represent a crisis for the field: the genocide accusation against Israel is anathema to the view that Israel has a special moral standing because it was established precisely in response to the horrors of the extermination of Jews. The charge of genocide has led to heated debates among scholars in a way that has not happened with genocides in Myanmar, Sudan, Rwanda, and elsewhere.Footnote22
This is evident in the polemics around how to understand the violence in Gaza. Within two months of the 7 October attack, scholars were already contending that Israel’s campaign was genocidal or was on the cusp of becoming so. In mid-October, Raz Segal, a Jewish Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, wrote that it was a “textbook case” of genocide.Footnote23 By November, scholars wrote an open letter warning of genocide: the extensive siege, denial of food and medicine, indiscriminate attacks, and dehumanizing language of the Israeli leadership framing all Palestinians as existential threats amounted to a clear danger of imminent or possibly already occurring genocide.Footnote24 An opposing letter signed primarily by Holocaust scholars placed all responsibility on Hamas and likened the group to Nazis.Footnote25 In December, another open letter warned of incitement to genocide, and called for scholars and institutions to actively work for a ceasefire.Footnote26 Of course, positions on Gaza do not line up neatly by whether one is primarily a Holocaust expert; a number of notable Holocaust scholars have called events in Gaza a genocide.Footnote27
To be sure, some of the early disagreements were over whether Israeli leaders displayed the intent of destroying the Gazan civilian population “in whole or in part,” per the UNCG that stipulates the centrality of perpetrator intention, which can create a thicket of interpretative issues.Footnote28 But for many comparativists, even those disagreements were often quite narrow in range, between those who believed genocide was occurring and those who feared it was imminent. That level of scholarly disagreement in genocide studies is not uncommon and reflects the typical challenges of connecting intentions and actions in “real time.” This is not the kind of disagreement that would throw a field into crisis.
Instead, the crisis reflects more profound normative disagreements over who is a legitimate victim worth grieving, how and when – if at all – mass violence can be justified, and over the (exceptional) moral status of the state of Israel.Footnote29 When we look at the existing evidence and compare this to the UNCG’s definition of genocide, it is evident the crisis is not one over empirics; by any reasonable assessment of the facts, what is happening in Gaza is genocidal or very close to it, and the scope of reasonable interpretations is not wide. This is not a crisis over methods for evaluating empirical evidence, for the atrocities are well-documented. In fact, they are better and more minutely documented in real time than many other cases. Nor do we lack information on expressions of genocidal intent from Israeli leaders.Footnote30 Certainly, there are disagreements over legal interpretations of intentionality central to the Genocide Convention (discussed in Part 3), even if evidence of genocidal intent has, to many scholars including me, become incontrovertible.
Rather, the crisis is a product of the particular history and origins of the field and how the condition of Palestinians remains outside of the normative priorities and analytical interest of many scholars, even while the atrocities continue. The crisis stems from the consequences of what it means to accuse a state of genocidal behaviour whose self-understanding is partly, but crucially, tied to providing a safe haven to Jews from future genocide. More precisely, there are at least three related but distinct issues at the centre of this debate in the field: the first is whether the Holocaust should be the primary empirical and normative metric by which to evaluate other instances of mass atrocities. The reemergence of this issue, one that most genocide scholars had thought settled, suggests the powerful way in which reference to the Holocaust can be used to demarcate what is and what is not a genocide, and in the process is used to exclude Gaza from consideration.Footnote31 The Holocaust becomes simultaneously unique and universal: it is a morally unique event because of its evil, but also universal in that all cases, especially now Gaza, are measured according to it. The second issue revolves around whether accusing Israel of committing genocide is antisemitic, which critics say creates a morally appalling equivalence between Jews and Nazis (even if numerous Jews have called this a genocide). And the third issue concerns whether calling Israel a settler colonial state and Zionism a supremacist ideology is antisemitic.Footnote32 This last point is wider in scope, as it speaks to the very legitimacy of the Israeli state in its current form – that is, as a state that combines liberal democracy with apartheid rule – and it remains the most contentious of the three. These three issues at the centre of the current scholarly crises over representation are all marked by discourses of exceptionality. Defenders of the Israeli military campaign frequently claim that the Gaza atrocities do not carry the same moral weight or horror as the Holocaust and thus cannot be called genocide, and moreover that the genocide accusation by activists and scholars is antisemitic because it unfairly singles out Israel. And, implicitly, that Israel’s foundation and consolidation should not be examined through any of the established social scientific categories used in the study of repression, ideology, colonialism, or violence.
But these are crises, and not merely typical scholarly points of contention, only if one accepts the premises of exceptionality as carrying normative weight that exempts Israeli policy from the same empirical and normative scrutiny that would (or should) be directed toward any other state committing atrocities. If, instead, we emphasize that no people, regardless of who they are, should suffer mass atrocities, and that Israel should be held to the standards of international humanitarian and human rights law, it becomes clear that the field’s crisis is born of an unwillingness to accept the full humanity of Palestinians, and not of any more mundane methodological disagreements typical of scholarship.
It is somewhat curious that Genocide Studies is also once again enmeshed in debates over the limitations of genocide as an analytical concept. What has happened in Gaza since 7 October does not challenge the analytical coherence of even the conventional and narrow understandings of genocide – certainly not in the same way that the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Cambodian genocide against the Khmer, or the attritional genocides typical of colonial expansion in the Americas and Australia have done. Those and many other cases revealed profound analytical shortcomings of the genocide concept, and in turn they have generated a wealth of sophisticated interventions into how genocide relates to other forms of violence.Footnote33 And yet by the most inflexible interpretation of genocide, Gaza qualifies as genocidal. Certainly, the full Palestinian experience of injustice since the Nakba is not completely captured by conventional readings of the concept of genocide, and the expansion of war into Lebanon along with the complex web of linkages to violence in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere reveal how any discussion of these broader systems of mass violence requires careful theoretical and analytical parsing. But even putting aside those valuable theoretical interventions on the concept of genocide that aim to expand the term’s remit and horizon – even if we remain steadfastly committed to the most conservative reading of genocide – what is happening in Gaza today is genocidal. The field’s crisis is not methodological or analytical. It is a crisis over the boundaries of normative exceptionality and the political and moral struggle over policing which bodies count and which do not. Of course, whether international courts will ultimately determine that genocide is occurring is a different matter, given the troublesome historical tendency to interpret genocide – and also war crimes, for that matter – in ways respectful to sovereign power.
International Law
The third crisis takes us from scholarly debates to international law. The crisis of Palestinians in Gaza is also the crisis of Gaza for the global legal order. International law and institutions are now badly damaged; in the words of over thirty UN experts, “the international order is breaking down in Gaza.”Footnote34 This crisis of global governance systems, amplified by the genocides in Gaza and Ukraine, has revealed how international law has weakened and today appears incapable of restraining violent sovereign power. Although the power of international law has waxed and waned over time, at present it is not evident how it can reestablish its relevance for administering accountability for atrocities.
Consider how law is simultaneously regulative and constitutive. It regulates certain types of behaviour by marking the boundary between what is prohibited and what is permitted. In doing so, it necessarily constitutes categories of violations and victims, though these may not reflect the experiential complexity and depth of lived suffering. This constitutive dimension of law delineates legally recognized and thus worthy victims, and legally unrecognized, or unworthy, victims. The double movement of regulation and constitution, which is also a kind of political and normative demarcation written in the grammar of jurisprudence, is particularly apparent today in the legal crimes of genocide and war crimes, both of which are often interpreted in ways that are deferential to state perpetrators, either through legal interpretations that establish high thresholds for proving genocidal intentionality and recognize a limited set of victim categories, or through the juridical deployment of exceptions that weaken the law’s applicability.
The Genocide Convention, as noted earlier in Part 2, refers to a set of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”Footnote35 This is normally interpreted as requiring proof of special intent (dolus specialis) to destroy a civilian group, so merely large-scale violence on its own is insufficient to qualify legally as genocide. Rather, it is necessary to show not only that the perpetrator committed relevant criminal acts, but did so with the specific intent of civilian group destruction, in whole or in part. Remaining within the tight parameters of legal texts and precedent, jurists have debated the substance and limits of special intent.Footnote36
The International Court of Justice, for example, has historically interpreted genocidal intentionality in narrow terms. The ICJ’s 2007 judgment in Bosnia vs. Serbia states that “for a pattern of conduct to be accepted as evidence [of genocidal intent], it would have to be such that it could only point to the existence of such intent,” a point echoed in the Court’s 2015 ruling in Croatia vs. Serbia.Footnote37 The Court has emphasized that an interpretation of conduct must align “only” with genocidal intent. This is at odds with much of the social scientific research on genocide, which finds that genocidal intent emerges over time out of a process of cumulative radicalization in shifting political and security conditions, and that intent may be underpinned by a wide variety of motivations (security, territorial conquest, retribution, ethnic purification, and so forth). In any case, the legal threshold for genocidal intent in international courts is so high that in practice it often shields perpetrators from criminal responsibility.Footnote38 Indeed, numerous scholars have detailed how the UNCG was drafted to protect states from legal responsibility.Footnote39
Given this history we should be hesitant to expect that the ICJ will hand down a decision in South Africa vs. Israel that reflects the reality of what is occurring. It is no surprise that prosecutors in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other international courts often pursue charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, which do not include the same criterion of special intent. It is certainly possible that the ICJ will rule that Israel is committing genocide. The ICJ’s provisional measures order in South Africa vs. Israel called for Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip,” and later ordered that, “Israel must immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” using language from the UNCG’s Article II(c).Footnote40 The Court also has before it other cases involving genocide allegations, such as The Gambia vs. Myanmar and Ukraine vs. Russia.Footnote41 Nevertheless, the Court’s operative interpretation of special intentionality suggests we should be cautious in expecting that the ICJ’s decision will accord with the empirical record and analyses produced by a wide range of experts and witnesses.
International humanitarian law (IHL) is also showing its shortcomings. IHL is primarily concerned with placing limitations on violence perpetrated by armed actors, whether state or non-state, occurring during armed conflict. Central to IHL is how to balance the reality of armed conflict and state interests with the moral imperative to protect civilians and prisoners of war, and to this end the law stipulates a set of fundamental principles. These include “humanity,” or protection of life and the limitation of destruction and harm during conflict; “distinction” between combatants and civilians, and between civilian “objects” and military targets; “proportionality” to ensure that the level of violence is commensurate with the objectives; and, “military necessity,” which permits actions directed only toward weakening the military capacity of the opponent, and which cannot violate the other fundamental principles.Footnote42 The goal is to balance the aims of defeating or weakening the enemy with minimizing civilian suffering. These principles are collectively part of IHL: one principle cannot be discarded, such as humanity, in favour of others, such as military necessity.
Nevertheless, this is not how modern IHL is often interpreted by violent states. International humanitarian law’s core principles are frequently reframed in practice to be deferential to state power. Gaza is, once again, a good illustration.Footnote43 In June 2024, the OHCHR issued a report finding Israel responsible for violating “fundamental principles of international humanitarian law on the conduct of hostilities” in its “indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks” in Gaza.Footnote44 Israel’s response was to deny culpability through a narrow reading of the law. Regarding indiscriminate aerial bombing, Israel stated, “in many instances, aerial munitions, including those with a wider area of effect, are the only type of weapon that can accomplish the military objective.”Footnote45 It criticized the OHCHR for a “legal analysis based on the final outcome” of the attacks rather than the internal – and undisclosed – Israeli decision-making process, and for the assumption that “attacking a large number of targets, or using certain munitions, implies a problem with the application of the rules of distinction,” suggesting that large-scale indiscriminate assaults can be militarily justified and thus legally permissible.Footnote46 The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) frequently states that it “conducts precise, intelligence-based” strikes and that “it will continue operating according to international law.”Footnote47 To accusations that it is imposing famine conditions on Gazan civilians, a war crime, the IDF responds that “Israel puts no limits on the amount of aid that can go into Gaza.”Footnote48
In the ICJ case of South Africa vs Israel, Israeli counsel summarized its moral evasion, stating
[it] is not the intent to destroy all or part of a people as such. Israel’s actions in restricting its targeting practices to attack military personnel or objectives in accordance with international humanitarian law in a proportionate manner in each case, as well as its practice of mitigating civilian harm … demonstrate the precise opposite of any possible genocidal intent … Every civilian casualty in this conflict is a human tragedy that demands our compassion. But the Court is not told how many thousands of casualties are in fact militants, how many were killed by Hamas fire, how many were civilians taking direct part in hostilities, and just how many are the result of legitimate and proportionate use of force against military targets, even if tragic … Of course, Israel does not have any right to violate the law, still less to commit genocide – and indeed it does not – but it does have every right to act to defend itself in accordance with the rules and principles of international law. And so it has done.Footnote49
The selective and tendentious reading of IHL appears to be more common among violence-prone liberal democracies such as Israel, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, since they are more sensitive to public accusations of employing raw violence. In response, they create a legal artifice deployed to legitimize state violence, even as it turns the law against itself like an ouroboros. This is evident, for instance, in the US’s stylized interpretations of IHL obligations in the “global war on terror,” which were used to justify torture, enforced disappearances, indiscriminate killings, drone assassinations, and the denial of Geneva Conventions protections to detainees.Footnote51 This logic has been extended to Gaza: in December 2024, the United States pressured the Famine Early Warning System to retract its finding that northern Gaza is at risk of imminent famine in an effort to insulate Israel from war crimes accusations.Footnote52 At the same time, Samantha Power, who, as head of USAID (the government agency tasked with coordinating US humanitarian aid), held a seat on President Biden’s National Security Council, evaded questions over American military support for Israel, instead remarking, “I actually feel really fortunate given the scale of the suffering that I’m in a position to be negotiating, things that I know seem small, maybe next to the scale suffering going on.”Footnote53 The massive legalization of US national security in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks combines the clinical discourse of international humanitarian law with the brutal fist of sovereign violence. As Orna Ben-Naftali, Eitan Diamond, and Aner Shofty have argued,
… legal professionals and institutions employing the language of law have been able to present an onslaught, which so many others consider to be a genocide, as a legitimate, if lamentable, act of self-defence.Footnote54
If IHL and the UNCG are statist in orientation, or least in common interpretation, the category of crimes against humanity is less so. Crimes against humanity refer to serious violations committed in contexts of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population,” and can occur during peace or wartime. The range of criminal actions is wide, and includes murder, rape, slavery, persecution, extermination, apartheid, and torture. The elements of the crime do not, however, include the standard of perpetrator intentionality nor the limited victim categories found in the Genocide Convention. Given that there is no hierarchy of crimes between genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, the latter is especially useful for holding state violators accountable. Nevertheless, even though crimes against humanity are defined in the ICC’s Elements of Crimes and are prohibited under a variety of treaties and customary law, there is no international treaty detailing state obligations, as is the case for genocide and international humanitarian law.Footnote55 A treaty could make a number of contributions, including articulating a comprehensive set of state responsibilities to prevent – and not only punish – such crimes, setting the parameters for extradition, establishing more robust legal protections for witnesses and survivors, and ultimately providing a needed legal touchstone for the adoption of domestic legislation prohibiting such crimes. Given its wider ambit of applicability, a crimes against humanity treaty can potentially overcome some of the limitations of IHL and the UNCG. In a welcome sign, support for such a treaty has grown recently.Footnote56
Another body of law, human rights law, is more expansive than IHL or the UNCG, encompassing a wide range of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. Drawing from and elaborating on the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the nine core international human rights instruments, consisting of a variety of treaties, covenants and optional protocols, codify a range of fundamental universal rights and state obligations that overlap with but go well beyond the narrow protection of civilians from atrocity crimes.Footnote57 The paradox, however, is that the state can suspend many, though not all, recognized human rights obligations under self-declared emergency conditions, whereas international laws concerning war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity are non-derogable.Footnote58 Therein lies a cruel irony: the most expansive bodies of law are the ones most vulnerable to the sovereign’s self-determination of exception. Israel’s long apartheid rule over the Occupied Territories exemplifies the extent and depth of such an institutionalized state of exception.
None of this is to discard the relevance of international law. It should not be jettisoned nor its core normative commitments dismissed as mere power play, if only because there is nothing better to replace it. But law cannot be salvaged merely by looking inwardly at its internal logic; it requires rethinking and assessing the state of global politics and the erosion of those international norms and institutions focused on civilian protection, as well as the breakdown of multilateralism within the UN system. This brings us to our fourth crisis, illustrated by the weakness of the UN’s norm of the responsibility to protect.
Responsibility to Protect
The responsibility to protect (R2P) is an international norm stipulating that states, and the “international community,” are obligated to protect their populations from atrocity crimes. Today, R2P is supposed to be embedded in a broad international atrocity prevention architecture that includes numerous governmental, intergovernmental, and civil society actors.Footnote59 To its defenders, it encapsulates the global promise of “never again.”
The roots of R2P lie in the international failure to arrest the mass slaughter that overtook the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Kosovo in the 1990s. R2P was very much a product of the expansion of the international human rights movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War, as the global order was being refashioned in liberal democratic terms in the wake of the collapse of communism.
The responsibility to protect was an important element of this new thinking. Indeed, in its earlier formulations it was quite audacious. Articulated by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001, it brought together a group of likeminded diplomats and activists to outline a global commitment to protect civilians from
the large-scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is either the product of either deliberate state action, or state neglect or state inability to act, or a failed state situation, or large-scale “ethnic cleansing,” actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.Footnote60
The 2001 ICISS report identified three primary responsibilities to prevent, react, and rebuild after atrocities.Footnote62 Unsurprisingly, the responsibility to react, which included the sharp end of military intervention, would prove the most contentious.
The 2004 UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change’s final report adopted much of the ICISS’s arguments while also arguing that peacebuilding and economic and social development should be understood as part of atrocity prevention.Footnote63 Annan was explicit about this in his preface, writing, “it is essential that due attention and necessary resources be devoted to achieving the Millennium Development Goals,” employing the development framework in use at the UN.Footnote64 But even within this wider ambit, the Panel’s report recognized that the use of force was contentious and it attempted to outline the guidelines for military interventions. The report states,
There is a growing recognition that the issue is not the ‘right to intervene’ of any State, but the ‘responsibility to protect’ of every State when it comes to people suffering from avoidable catastrophe – mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion and terror, and deliberate starvation and exposure to disease.Footnote65
collective international responsibility to protect, exercisable by the Security Council authorizing military intervention as a last resort, in the event of genocide and other large-scale killing, ethnic cleansing or serious violations of international humanitarian law which sovereign Governments have proved powerless or unwilling to prevent.Footnote66
The UN General Assembly (UNGA) endorsed the responsibility to protect at the 2005 UN World Summit, though now largely shorn of the ICISS’s extensive elaboration. Paragraphs 138 and 139 of the UN’s World Summit Outcome Document underscore R2P obligations and reaffirm the basic division of labour on international security, noting that the international community of member states, “through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the [UN] Charter, to help to protect populations,” but that “collective action, in a timely and decisive manner” must happen through the UN Security Council, though “in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate.”Footnote67
The Secretary-General delineated the now well-known “three-pillar” strategy of R2P implementation in 2009.Footnote68 The first pillar establishes that states carry the primary obligation of protecting populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. The second pillar charges the international community with the responsibility to support states in fulfilling this obligation. The third pillar asserts that if a state fails in its duty, the international community must be ready to take collective action, using diplomatic, humanitarian, and other appropriate measures in line with the United Nations Charter.
R2P’s development is often framed as an improvement over the traditional arguments defending humanitarian military intervention that dominated debates in the 1990s, and advocates have generated substantial research and policy work supporting the norm. R2P has been cited in over ninety UN Security Council resolutions on crises and in various topical resolutions on genocide and conflict prevention. The General Assembly has invoked R2P in over thirty-five resolutions, and the UN Human Rights Council has done so eighty times.Footnote69
And yet, R2P has faced several problems, three of which are especially evident at present. The first is that much of the focus on the responsibility to protect within the UN has been on the conceptual elaboration of the norm and not on the practical work of developing regular institutional mechanisms for investigation, evaluation, recommendations, and accountability. The regular UN R2P reports produced by the Secretary-General are a reflection of this problem: they rarely discuss in detail a plan or programme for R2P mainstreaming.Footnote70 There are many reasons for this, but a key point seems to be that the UN leadership has provided little support for a robust R2P beyond symbolic statements, as my colleague Douglas Irvin-Erickson and I have detailed in a recent policy report.Footnote71
The focus on conceptual elaboration over practical implementation mechanisms highlights a second problem, namely that the crucial 1st and 2nd pillars that emphasize prevention (including preventing the structural causes of atrocities) rather than intervention, are underdeveloped and largely ignored. Pillars 1 and 2 in fact could be employed for a much more radical rethinking of national and global obligations, since any serious commitment to addressing the root causes of mass violence would entail some engagement with addressing material poverty and inequality, as well as regional and global systems of economic and political exploitation. To be sure, the UN system is not the only venue for doing this kind of work – international discourse around “development,” for example, is often ameliorative rather than transformative – but the point remains that the first two pillars could offer an entry into these discussions through the discourse of national and global responsibility, especially given that R2P was endorsed by the General Assembly in 2005.
The third problem, unsurprisingly, concerns the third pillar of “timely and decisive response by the international community.” The practical understanding of R2P within the UN has become narrower and centred on the hard edge of military force, even if formal UN documents repeatedly highlight the importance of attending to structural causes of violence. Decolonial thinkers like Siddharth Mallavarapu and Mahmood Mamdani have condemned R2P as little more than a tool for western domination washed through the legitimizing discourse of human rights.Footnote72 Jeremy Moses shows how R2P-inflected discourse often makes dubiously clear distinctions between the liberal democratic defenders of human rights and authoritarian regimes that perpetrate mass atrocities, and moreover how it can be used as a legitimizing concept for unending humanitarian wars of salvation.Footnote73
These and other criticisms highlight the moral hypocrisy of an ethical discourse that may function to project state power. Critics caution using military intervention, especially when it is driven by western powers, and instead endorse a clear preference for resolving conflicts through multilateral diplomacy that avoids military means and prioritizes development-focused strategies for atrocity prevention.Footnote74 The criticisms were especially evident during the 2011 Libya crisis, when the UN Security Council (UNSC) authorized military force against Libya as President Muammar Gaddafi’s troops threatened a massacre in Benghazi. The UNSC resolution initially received wide support, but that evaporated as NATO’s military campaign continued. The case of Libya soured many countries on R2P, and if anything reinforced the longstanding accusations of countries like Cuba and Russia that R2P was partisan – even as Russia invoked R2P in its 2008 attack on Georgia.
While this critique of R2P as a potential neocolonial tool is compelling in some ways, it is also incomplete, as it minimizes the significant contributions of Global South researchers, activists, and governments to R2P’s development over the past two decades, a point noted by decolonial scholar Coralie Pison Hindawi.Footnote75 Diplomats and governments in South Africa, Nigeria, and Algeria have been central to contesting, shaping, and strengthening R2P, especially the second pillar, and regional actors like ECOWAS and the African Union have used R2P or similar concepts at various times.Footnote76 Many Latin American activists and some governments played an important early role in attempting to expand the set of protections laid out in the norm, and today there are a large number of R2P networks that include Global South countries.Footnote77 Many of these efforts complicate the assumption that the western military powers are the inherent defenders of human rights or sole advocates of R2P, and instead they seek to refine and advance the norm to safeguard it from potential misuse. In short, to characterize R2P as merely a tool of powerful western states ignores the substantial insights and elaborations of the norm carried out by some Global South actors.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt R2P is in dire straits, like the international atrocity prevention architecture more generally.Footnote78 The perception that R2P is primarily about the use of military force remains strong, regardless of pillars 1 and 2. In a strict sense R2P does not expand powers in the UN Charter’s Chapter VII, which places authority to determine when and how to use force in the Security Council.Footnote79 But this may be beside the point. Alex Bellamy notes, “today, R2P is widely considered too controversial to be used as a vehicle for either activism, practice, or institutional reform aimed at protecting vulnerable populations from atrocity crimes.”Footnote80 For many governments and critics, R2P is about military intervention.
Remaining support had declined well before 7 October, as the violence in Libya, Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine, Yemen, and elsewhere have gone unchecked. But Gaza has no doubt solidified its marginalization, or in any case revealed its current irrelevance. It is notable that R2P has not served as a significant rallying point for responding to the Gaza genocide; some human rights organizations have issued a number of sharp statements and analyses referring to R2P, but this remains a minority position.Footnote81
It is thus not surprising that some critics have argued that R2P is unsalvageable. Reflecting on Gaza, Jeremy Moses writes,
While in the past I have suggested that a pacifist ethos could help to bring R2P in line with its universal claims, I no longer believe this to be a useful ambition. After Gaza, the R2P no longer represents a viable normative agenda for humanitarianism in general, as the burden of its unbreakable association with the military power of the United States and NATO is now more evident than ever.Footnote82
Both Jeremy Moses and Alex Bellamy emphasize that R2P is primarily a political norm, not only a moral and legal one. Gaza has clearly shown this political dimension, as if this reminder were needed once again. And yet one of the problematic consequences of the professionalization of high-level atrocity prevention and response has been the focus on abstract normative development and the fine-tuning of technical expertise and “toolboxes,” without explicitly confronting the issues of asymmetric political power and the inherent ethical dilemmas at the heart of prevention and response work – a point, it should be noted, that bedevils much professional peacebuilding work.Footnote84 These limitations of R2P as a norm in turn speak to the decline of multilateralism as a practice in international atrocity prevention.
Multilateralism and Atrocity Prevention
Multilateralism is undoubtedly a fraught term; it is simultaneously a prized concept in international diplomacy about the willingness of countries to work together peacefully toward a common end, and also a term pilloried by critics as cover for the exercise of rough power on prone states. No doubt, multilateralism is used strategically to advance narrow interests – such as the US “coalition of the willing” during the Iraq War – but at its core the concept points to the need to collectively address problems that cannot be resolved by individual states. Atrocity prevention in particular benefits from multilateralism to ensure the broad legitimacy necessary for dealing with such pressing challenges. But if R2P signalled an aspirational highpoint of multilateral action, the present moment reveals multilateralism’s nadir.
Multilateralism in the UN has eroded significantly, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and then with Gaza, and the short and midterm prospects for multilateral peacebuilding and atrocity prevention are dim. The UNSC’s permanent three members of China, Russia, and the United States have effectively gutted the ability of the UN to address severe atrocity situations where doing so impinges on their interests, which is not surprising given their complicity in a number of atrocities.Footnote85 The Secretariat has proven incapable of preventing the erosion of multilateralism, often finding itself at a loss on how to navigate the competing interests of powerful states while preserving the modest accomplishments it can claim.
The ambitious UN Summit of the Future held in September 2024 was meant to re-energize multilateralism.Footnote86 The Summit resulted in the “inter-governmentally negotiated, action-oriented” Pact for the Future, which laid out nearly 60 commitments along several themes.Footnote87 Fifteen of these commitments concerned international peace and security, and included “actions” such as protecting all civilians in armed conflict (action 14); ensuring humanitarian aid reaches civilians (action 15); promoting cooperation and understanding among states, defusing tensions, and pursuing peaceful settlements of disputes (action 16); and complying with and upholding the decisions of the International Court of Justice (action 17), among others. But the Pact is long on aspirations and short on enforcement mechanisms. Most of these actions depend on the Security Council for implementation, but the US, Russia or China will certainly veto or ignore these prescriptions whenever they conflict with their interests. The United States has vetoed or stymied any substantive UNSC action on Israel while continuing to send weapons used in the butchery of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. China bristles at an OHCHR report holding it responsible for atrocities against Uyghurs and other minorities, while Russia simply ignores UN principles and the ICJ in furthering its genocidal campaign in Ukraine.Footnote88
Regional intergovernmental organizations are also showing the limits of multilateralism. The European Union’s support for Ukraine has been weakened by the rise of far-right parties and growing exhaustion with the war, while the Organization of American States has proven incapable of addressing crises in Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The African Union has been unable to dampen armed conflicts in Sudan, the horn of Africa, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Libya, or the spread of authoritarianism across the Sahel, while the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been especially weak on atrocity prevention, evident in its failure to pressure Myanmar over its violent repression of numerous ethnic groups, including the Rohingya.Footnote89
Certainly, many states remain invested in multilateralism and support the Pact for the Future, often the same states that support the responsibility to protect.Footnote90 Small states in particular have played a central role in advocating for international law and cooperation in peacebuilding, development, and tackling climate change.Footnote91 These states remain committed to the international system precisely because they face challenges at a scale and level of complexity that are impossible to address individually, but also because they realize that a global order without a system of rules would only endanger them. And some have occasionally taken leadership roles: when the UNSC was deadlocked on Gaza, Malta was instrumental in organizing support to advance Resolution 2712 in November 2023 to establish humanitarian access to civilians. Liechtenstein successfully lobbied for a General Assembly resolution demanding a suspension of weapons deliveries to Myanmar after the 2021 coup, and also succeeded in passing a resolution requiring the General Assembly to meet within ten days whenever a Security Council permanent member (P5) casts a veto in the UNSC, a move that was hailed as a sign of the strength of coalitional power in UNGA and broad disgust with the UNSC’s permanent members.
But their space for maneuver is constrained by China, Russia, and the United States. While these and other initiatives are certainly welcome, they have not significantly impacted the intractability of UNSC behaviour on dealing with atrocities. One option is to expand the number of permanent members on the Security Council, a long-running demand by countries across the Global South, especially Brazil, South Africa, and India. More recently, Sierra Leone has pushed for this and garnered some surprising support, including from the Biden administration (though the US opposes extending the veto to any additional permanent seat).Footnote92 This may be a worthy goal, especially since the UNSC permanent members are the legacy of a post-World War II politics that does not reflect the current world. Nevertheless, it is not evident how enlarging the permanent membership, especially if this includes the veto power, would improve the efficacy of the Security Council in carrying out its mandate to ensure international peace and stability. The spoiler problem that haunts the Security Council would only be amplified among a larger number of countries, especially when an atrocity case affects their national self-interest.
The best outcome would be to eliminate the veto, but this is unlikely given the obstacles. A more plausible yet still impactful approach is to place limits on the use of vetoes for certain classes of issues that come before the UNSC, such as imminent or ongoing atrocities situations. Jennifer Trahan has persuasively detailed how the legality of the veto can be challenged.Footnote93 More specifically, one possible way to circumvent the veto stranglehold is to rethink the uses of the General Assembly’s Resolution 377A, known as the “Uniting for Peace” resolution. The text states:
that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.Footnote94
The reason for turning to the General Assembly is not because it is naturally more concerned with peace and justice than the Security Council – obviously, it can suffer from collective action problems and spoilers – but rather because at the present this is where the centre of gravity for atrocity prevention and response is found, particularly in the various member states’ “friends” networks like the Global Network of R2P Focal Points, the European Network of R2P Focal Points, Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes, the Latin American Network for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, Group of Friends of the Responsibility to Protect, and so forth.
This venue is not a panacea, certainly, and we should remain wary of placing too much hope in the UN’s peacebuilding abilities or its will to respond; it is by now well established that peacebuilding work cannot be implemented solely top-down if it is to succeed.Footnote96 But the collapse of multilateralism has placed enormous roadblocks in securing the conditions to prevent, ameliorate, and end mass atrocities around the world, and international legitimacy and coordination is a necessary component of response. And, once again, Gaza serves as a synecdoche for this crisis, as the pathologies and failures of multilateralism are crystallized in the suffering of the Gazan people.
Conclusion
This article outlined a series of related crises, ranging from the immediate crisis of Gaza to a series of cascading and widening crises that run through genocide research, the law, global norms for civilian protection, and the practices of powerful countries. These crises are rooted in profound harms. The present moment, one of enormous suffering for some and indifference for others, is also one of tremendous despair over the failures of our leaders and institutions to arrest shocking levels of carnage around the world. The fury that has been unleashed upon Gazans, and Palestinians more generally, is also found in numerous other places, even if the specifics may differ. And with such fury come trauma, dispossession, and broken lives that will not easily mend after the killings stop.
Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet, returned repeatedly in his work to the pain of violence and exile that still echoes in the present. Reflecting on the legacy of displacement and destruction, and the longing for home, he wrote,
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Ernesto Verdeja
Ernesto Verdeja is Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Keough School of Global Affairs, and concurrent Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, United States. His current research focuses on the causes and prevention of genocide and mass atrocities. He also regularly consults with governments and human rights organizations on genocide and atrocity prevention, and on transitional justice. His research can be found at everdeja.weebly.com.
Notes
1 Mahmoud Darwish, “Exile,” in If I Were Another (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2009), 166.
2 Haaretz Editorial Board, “Netanyahu's Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza Is on Display for All to See,” 10 November 2024; Crispian Balmer, “Former Israeli Defense Minister Yaalon Warns of Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza,” Reuters, 1 December 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/former-israeli-defense-minister-yaalon-warns-ethnic-cleansing-gaza-2024-12-01/.
3 Francesca Albanese, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” General Assembly, A/79/384, 1 October 2024, https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n24/279/68/pdf/n2427968.pdf.
4 Francesca Albanese, “Anatomy of a Genocide,” Human Rights Council, A/HRC/55/73, 25 March 2024, paragraph 7, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session55/advance-versions/a-hrc-55-73-auv.pdf.
5 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Gaza is ‘running out of time’ UN experts warn, demanding a ceasefire to prevent genocide,” 2 November 2023, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/gaza-running-out-time-un-experts-warn-demanding-ceasefire-prevent-genocide; Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, “IPC Famine Review Committee Alert: Gaza Strip,” 8 November 2024, https://www.ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ipcinfo/docs/IPC_FRC_Alert_Gaza_Nov2024.pdf.
6 UNICEF, “Statement by UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell on a deadly weekend of attacks in North Gaza,” 2 November 2024, https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/statement-unicef-executive-director-catherine-russell-deadly-weekend-attacks-north.
7 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war,” 20 November 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/11/un-special-committee-finds-israels-warfare-methods-gaza-consistent-genocide?utm_source=The+New+Humanitarian&utm_campaign=007e1f657a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_Cheat_Sheet_15_11&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d842d98289-007e1f657a-75439233; Amnesty International, “Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territory: ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” 5 December 2024, available at https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/; Human Rights Watch, “Extermination and Acts of Genocide,” 19 December 2024, available at https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/19/extermination-and-acts-genocide/israel-deliberately-depriving-palestinians-gaza.
8 UN Secretary-General, “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan: Report of the Secretary-General”, UN doc. A/78/554, 25 October 2023; Oren Ziv, “‘It’s Like 1948’: Israel Cleanses Vast West Bank Region of Nearly all Palestinians,” +972 Magazine, 31 August 2023.
9 See B’tselem, “Ten Israeli human rights organizations to ICC Prosecutor: We are all committed to assisting your office in advancing the ongoing investigation of the Situation in Palestine,” 28 December 2022, https://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20221228_10_ngos_to_icc_prosecutor_we_are_all_committed_to_assisting_your_officein_advancing_the_ongoing_investigation_of_the_situation_in_palestine.
10 B’tselem, “Not a Vibrant Democracy: This is Apartheid,” October 2022, https://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/202210_not_a_vibrant_democracy_this_is_apartheid_eng.pdf’; Amnesty International, “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity,” February 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/; Human Rights Watch, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” 27 April 2021, https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution. International Court of Justice, “Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Including East Jerusalem,” 19 July 2024, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/186/186-20240719-adv-01-00-en.pdf. Also see the earlier ICJ Advisory Opinion, “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” 9 July 2004, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/131/131-20040709-ADV-01-00-EN.pdf.
11 Rabea Eghbariah, “Toward Nakba as Legal Concept,” Columbia Law Review 124, no. 4 (2024), https://columbialawreview.org/content/toward-nakba-as-a-legal-concept/.
12 Raz Segal and Luigi Daniele, “Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism: Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Unprecedented Crisis to Unprecedented Change,” Journal of Genocide Research, 5 March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2325804; Omar McDoom, “Expert Commentary, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and the Question of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research, 25 April 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2346403; Amos Goldberg, “The Problematic Return of Intent,” Journal of Genocide Research, 15 October 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2413175.
13 Abdelwahab El-Affendi, “The Futility of Genocide Studies After Gaza,” Journal of Genocide Research, 18 January 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2305525.
14 United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” 9 December 1948, https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf.
15 Adam Jones, “Scholarly Definitions,” Genocide (New York: Routledge, 2017), 23–27.
16 Goldberg, “The Problematic Return of Intent.”
17 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Murder and Persecution of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995); Robert Melson, “The Armenian Genocide as Precursor and Prototype of Twentieth-Century Genocide,” in Is The Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan Rosenbaum (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).
18 Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken, 1989).
19 Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
20 Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses, eds., Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Alan Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique?, see note 17.
21 Damien Short and Haifa Rashed, “Palestine,” in Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death, and Ecocide, ed. Damien Short (London: Zed Books, 2016); Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, eds., The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
22 Segal and Daniele, “Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism.”
23 Raz Segal, “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” Jewish Currents, 13 October 2023, https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide.
24 See “Public Statement: Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza,” OpinioJuris, International Commission of Jurists, 18 October 2023, https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/18/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potential-genocide-in-gaza/.
25 “Scholars of the Holocaust Condemn Hamas Terror and Denounce the Rise of Global Antisemitism,” accessed 10 October 2024, https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfM8f78BT77iwUO4B-82YKWTsVOpvR_zcSIJxTlLJJYP99yKw/viewform?fbclid=IwAR0bcD4UBjPWOKESkkoxvt5sbu5ZVwqH8M8vrVOfgMUwNKOGrDonMPTIkRo.
26 “Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October,” Contending Modernities, 9 December 2023, https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/statement-of-scholars-7-october/.
27 See Omer Bartov, “Omer Bartov – Israel Guilty of Genocide, Ethnic-cleansing; US Totally Complicit; Israel Could Implode,” The Wire, 4 October 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjShVWKN_-M.
28 Goldberg, “The Problematic Return of Intent.”
29 McDoom, “Expert Commentary, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and the Question of Genocide.”
30 Albanese, “Anatomy of a genocide;” Albanese, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967: Genocide as Colonial Erasure.”
31 Israel Charny, “Leading Genocide Scholar Israel Charny on Gaza War,” Genocide Watch, 2 February 2024, https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/leading-genocide-scholar-israel-charny-on-gaza-war; American Jewish Committee, “5 Reasons Why the Events in Gaza are not ‘Genocide’,” 23 November 2023, https://www.ajc.org/news/5-reasons-why-the-events-in-gaza-are-not-genocide.
32 On the Israeli peace movement, see Atalia Omer, When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
33 A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; Anne O’Byrne and Martin Shuster, eds., Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence in the Contemporary World (London: Routledge, 2020).
34 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “‘The international order is breaking down in Gaza’: UN experts mark one year of genocidal attacks on Palestinians,” 11 October 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2024/10/international-order-breaking-down-gaza-un-experts-mark-one-year-genocidal.
35 United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
36 Payam Akhavan, Reducing Genocide to Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Ernesto Verdeja, “Genocide: Debating Definitions,” in Responding to Genocide: The Politics of International Action, eds. Adam Lupel and Ernesto Verdeja (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013), 21–46.
37 International Court of Justice, “Application of The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro) – Judgment,” 26 February 2007, para. 373, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/91/091-20070226-JUD-01-00-EN.pdf; International Court of Justice, “Application of The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Croatia v. Serbia) – Judgment,” 3 February 2015, paras. 146–148, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/118/118-20150203-JUD-01-00-EN.pdf.
38 Jennifer Balint, Genocide, State Crime, and the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 23–26.
39 Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Moses, The Problems of Genocide; Randle C. DeFalco, Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
40 International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) – Provisional Measures, Order,” 26 January 2024, paras. 79, 86(3), https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203447; International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) – Request for the Modification of the Order of 28 March 2024, Order,” 24 May 2024, para. 57, https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204091.
41 International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide (The Gambia v. Myanmar) – Application Instituting Proceedings and Request for Provisional Measures,” 11 November 2019, https://www.icj-cij.org/public/files/case-related/178/178-20191111-APP-01-00-EN.pdf; International Court of Justice, “Allegations of Genocide under the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide (Ukraine v. Russian Federation) – Application Instituting Proceedings,” 27 February 2022, https://www.icj-cij.org/case/182/institution-proceedings.
42 International Committee of the Red Cross, “Fundamentals Principles of International Humanitarian Law,” https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/fundamental-principles-ihl.
43 Camila Boisen, “Israel’s Punitive War In Gaza,” Journal of Genocide Research, 26 September 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2406098.
44 OHCHR, “Thematic Report: Indiscriminate and Disproportionate Attacks During The Conflict in Gaza,” 19 June 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/opt/20240619-ohchr-thematic-report-indiscrim-disprop-attacks-gaza-oct-dec2023.pdf.
45 Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations, “Israel’s Initial Response to the OHCHR Background Note,” New York, June 2024, 7, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/opt/israel-initial-response-ohchr-background-note-june2024.pdf.
46 Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations, 1.
47 Israel Defense Forces, “Press Briefing by IDF Spokesperson RAdm. Daniel Hagari,” 6 June 2024, https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/israel-at-war/briefings-by-idf-spokesperson-rear-admiral-daniel-hagari/june-24-press-briefings/press-briefing-by-idf-spokesperson-radm-daniel-hagari-june-6-2024/.
48 Emmanuel Fabian, “US seeks probe of Gaza aid stampede; IDF ‘tried to disperse mob’ that ambushed trucks,” Times of Israel, 1 March 2024, https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-pushes-for-probe-into-gaza-aid-stampede-israel-says-troops-tried-to-disperse-mob/.
49 International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) – Verbatim Record,” 12 January 2024, para. 41, 69, https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203424.
50 Nida Al-Mughrabi, “Dozens killed and wounded in Israeli strikes across Gaza, medics say,” Reuters, 17 November 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/tens-killed-wounded-israeli-strike-residential-building-gazas-beit-lahiya-medics-2024-11-17/.
51 See Amnesty International, “Iraq: 20 years since the US-led coalition invaded Iraq, impunity reigns supreme,” 20 March 2023, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/03/iraq-20-years-since-the-us-led-coalition-invaded-iraq-impunity-reigns-supreme/; Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2021).
52 Ellen Knickmeyer, “The US Says It Pushed a Retraction of a Famine Warning for North Gaza; Aid Groups Express Concern,” AP News, 26 December 2024, https://apnews.com/article/gaza-israel-famine-biden-trump-fews-89b4a0d3ab684669ee4456566b406621.
53 Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, “Humanitarian Superstar Samantha Power Admits Gaza is a Loss,” Responsible Statecraft, 19 December 2024, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/samantha-power-gaza-2670499374/.
54 Orna Ben-Naftali, Eitan Diamond and Aner Shofty, “Esprit des Corpse: Genocide in the Shadowland of Gaza?” Journal of Genocide Research, 25 October 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2418670.
55 International Criminal Court, Elements of Crimes, The Hague, 2013, https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/Publications/Elements-of-Crimes.pdf.; Secretary-General, “Report on Crimes Against Humanity,” A/78/717, 12 January 2024, https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n24/013/69/pdf/n2401369.pdf.
56 Leila Nadya Sadat and Akila Radhakrishnan, “Justice Delayed is Justice Denied,” Just Security, 23 October 2024, https://www.justsecurity.org/104188/justice-delayed-denied-crimes-against-humanity-treaty/; Richard Dicker, “Moving Ahead to a Crimes Against Humanity Treaty,” Opinio Juris, 19 December 2024, https://opiniojuris.org/2024/12/19/moving-ahead-to-a-crimes-against-humanity-treaty/.
57 See OHCHR, “The Core International Human Rights Instruments and their Monitoring Bodies,” United Nations, n.d., https://www.ohchr.org/en/core-international-human-rights-instruments-and-their-monitoring-bodies.
58 See Article 4 (1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and more generally https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/SlidesChapter16.pdf.
59 Jeffrey Bachman, The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022).
60 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect, 2001, xii, https://r2pasiapacific.org/files/292/ICISS%20Report.pdf.
61 Kofi Annan, “We the Peoples: the role of the United Nations in the twenty-first century,” Report of the Secretary-General of the UN, 2000, UN Doc. A/54/2000.
62 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect, https://r2pasiapacific.org/files/292/ICISS%20Report.pdf
63 High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, Final Report, A/59/565, December 2004, https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/gaA.59.565_En.pdf.
64 Ibid., para. 7.
65 Ibid., para. 201.
66 Ibid., para. 203.
67 General Assembly, World Summit Outcome Document, A/Res/601/1, 24 October 2005, para. 139.
68 Secretary-General, Implementing the Responsibility to Protect, A/63/677, 12 January 2009.
69 Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at https://www.globalr2p.org/resources/.
70 Secretary-General, “Responsibility to Protect: The Commitment to Prevent and Protect Populations from Atrocity Crimes,” United Nations: New York NY. A/78/901-S/2024/434, 3 June 2024.
71 Douglas Irvin-Erickson and Ernesto Verdeja, “An Assessment of the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect,” Stimson Center, 3 December 2024, https://www.stimson.org/2024/an-assessment-of-the-un-office-on-genocide-prevention-and-the-responsibility-to-protect/.
72 Siddharth Mallavarapu, “Colonialism and the Responsibility to Protect,” in Theorizing the Responsibility to Protect, ed. Ramesh Thakur and William Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 305–322; Mahmood Mamdani, “Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish?” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 4, no. 1 (2010): 53–67.
73 Jeremy Moses, “Gaza and the Political and Moral Failure of the Responsibility to Protect,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 16 February 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2024.2304987.
74 Monica Serrano and Thomas Weiss (eds.), The International Politics of Human Rights: Rallying to the R2P Cause? (London: Routledge, 2014), 107–128.
75 Coralie Pison Hindawi, “Decolonizing the Responsibility to Protect: On Pervasive Eurocentrism, Southern Agency and Struggles over Universals,” Security Dialogue 53, no.1 (2022): 38–56.
76 Kwesi Aning and Flifli Edu-Afful, “African Agency in R2P: Interventions by African Union and ECOWAS in Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, and Libya,” International Studies Review 18, no. 1 (2016): 120–133; Jennifer Welsh, “Norm Contestation and the Responsibility to Protect,” Global Responsibility to Protect 5, no. 4 (2013): 365–396.
77 See International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect, the Global Network of R2P Focal Points, the Latin American Network for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, and Group of Friends of the Responsibility to Protect.
78 Matthew Levinger, “Revivifying the Responsibility to Protect: Strengthening the Normative Consensus for Atrocity Prevention,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 18, no. 1 (2024): 190–211.
79 Alex Bellamy, “The Discomforts of Politics: What Future for Atrocity Prevention?” Just Security, 31 October 2023, https://www.justsecurity.org/89832/the-discomforts-of-politics-what-future-for-atrocity-prevention/.
80 Ibid.
81 Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, “Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” Populations at Risk, 1 December 2024, https://www.globalr2p.org/countries/israel-and-the-occupied-palestinian-territory/.
82 Jeremy Moses, “Gaza and the Political and Moral Failure of the Responsibility to Protect,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 18, no. 2 (2024): 211–215.
83 This was evident in our interviews with peacebuilders and UN officials, see Irvin-Erickson and Verdeja, “An Assessment of the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.”
84 Ernesto Verdeja, “Critical Genocide Studies and Mass Atrocity Prevention,” Genocide Studies and Prevention, 13 no. 3 (2019): 111–127; Catherine Goetze, The Distinction of Peace: A Social Analysis of Peacebuilding (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017); Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Douglas Irvin-Erickson, and Ernesto Verdeja, Wicked Problems: The Ethics of Action for Peace, Rights, and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
85 Federica D’Alessandra, “Conceptualizing Great Power Perpetrators,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 18, no. 1 (2024): 151–189.
86 UN Summit of the Future, https://www.un.org/en/summit-of-the-future.
87 UN General Assembly, “Pact for the Future,” A/Res/79/1, September 2024. https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/sotf-the-pact-for-the-future.pdf.
88 High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China,” August 2022, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/2022-08-31/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf.
89 VOA News, “Laos ASEAN summit to focus on Myanmar crisis,” 7 October 2024, https://www.voanews.com/a/laos-asean-summit-to-focus-on-myanmar-crisis/7813461.html.
90 Most of the major supporters of multilateralism are small countries. See the Sustainable Development Report’s “2024 Index of Countries’ Support to UN-Based Multilateralism,” (UN-MI), https://dashboards.sdgindex.org/chapters.
91 Adam Lupel, Kaewkamol Pitakdumrongkit, and Joel Ng, “Small States and the Multilateral System: Transforming Global Governance for a Better Future,” International Peace Institute, September 2024, https://www.ipinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Small-States-and-the-Multilateral-System-web.pdf.
92 Security Council Report, “High-level Debate,” 9 August 2024, https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/whatsinblue/2024/08/high-level-debate-on-addressing-the-historical-injustice-and-enhancing-africas-effective-representation-on-the-un-security-council.php. Also https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/world/africa/us-un-security-council-africa-permanent-seats.html.
93 Jennifer Trahan, Existing Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
94 General Assembly, Resolution 377A, November 1950, para. A1. https://documents.un.org/doc/resolution/gen/nr0/059/75/pdf/nr005975.pdf.
95 “United Nations Charter,” 26 June 1945, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text.
96 Lisa Schirch, Strategic Peacebuilding (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2004); Pamina Firchow, Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation After War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Robert Ricigliano, Making Peace Last (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2012); Severine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
97 Darwish, “Exile,” 169.
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