Bombings, ground attacks and sexual violence — part of Sudan’s scorched-earth counterinsurgency strategy — have driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in South Kordofan, the Sudanese state where the Nuba Mountains are located. In some ways, the brutality here feels like an echo of what Sudan did in Darfur, only now it is Nubans who are targets.

It’s impossible to confirm Kafi’s full story, but others verified that she had been kidnapped. And many other Nubans recount similar attacks, or describe similar racial epithets. As in Darfur, the Sudanese soldiers often call their darker-skinned victims their “slaves.” Ahmed Haroun, a Sudanese official wanted by the International Criminal Court for committing crimes against humanity in Darfur, is now the governor of South Kordofan, and he seems to be employing similar tactics here.

The Kristof dispatch, issued from South Sudan’s Yida refugee camp, has provoked the usual (incisive) hubbub from the blogosphere. Texas in Africa’s Laura Seay drew the first blow, condemning Kristof for his irresponsible approach to journalistic ethics, cavalier attitude towards humanitarian aid delivery in the Sudanese border state, and simplistic removal of Sudanese agency from the South Kordofan discourse. Seay is particularly compelling on the aid question, echoing my prior point about the moral hazards of humanitarianism in the region:

The problem now is that because of Kristof’s shenanigans, NGO’s in the region are very reluctant to help reporters get the story. Moreover, as it’s pretty clear from Kristof’s column that Samaritan’s Purse is likely helping him, that puts aid workers – especially those working for SP – on the ground in danger, especially if the SAF really is out trying to find Kristof. Rather than being perceived by those on the ground as a neutral humanitarian agency, Samaritan’s Purse is now seen as an ally of South Sudan. That’s an incredibly dangerous situation for those who are trying to carry out neutral humanitarian work.

As a follow-up to the NGO point, Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian charity based in the United States, is the only humanitarian aid organization to have called for the implementation of a no-fly zone over South Kordofan, raising credible concerns about the continued “neutrality” of their aid operations.

Reiterating Seay’s critique, A View from the Cave’s Tom Murphy questions Kristof’s conflict narrative, citing a new Autesserre paper on the unintended consequences of dominant advocacy and policymaking narratives. Murphy rightly condemns the advocacy community for its continued reliance on old, essentialized perceptions of conflict, which undercut a nuanced cognitive framework for policy analysis:

All of these many factors made the situation on the ground in Darfur incredibly complex and challenging.  Small victories were won, but the humanitarian crisis still remains unresolved. By likening Darfur and South Kordofan, Kristof makes the same mistake as he and others made in 2003. It may get more people to pay attention, but it could also lead to a skewed understanding as to what is really happening.

Of course, it’s all well and good to condemn organizational actors for a lack of complexity, but it’s also important to explain how the complexities function, why they’re valuable to consider, and what they mean for policy formation. In Sudan, especially, it’s worth delving into a couple questions: how is the South Kordofan conflict different from Darfur? Or, rather, how is the South Kordofan conflict different from our common narrative of the Darfur conflict? Why does that matter, and what policy/advocacy adjustments are necessary to accommodate the distinct narrative?

First, let’s start by laying out points of commonality: Sudan’s modern history of violent conflict, particularly in the aftermath of the Bashir regime’s 1989 coup, has resulted from the persistent marginalization of ethnicized political communities from the central state. The Sudanese state has failed to distribute the spoils of economic progress, political patronage, and social hierarchy, inheriting the practice of provincial marginalization from its colonial predecessors. Accordingly, marginalization, underdevelopment, and political exclusivity have served as a key catch-phrases for opposition groups throughout Sudan, beginning with the eastern Sudanese Beja Congress (founded in 1958). Indeed, the Justice and Equality Movement’s 2000 “Black Book,” a key text in the primary-source literature on the Darfur conflict, is filled with statistical and qualitative references to the exclusion of Darfuris from Khartoum’s center.

From a national perspective, the South Kordofan conflict bears striking similarities. Marginalization, non-inclusive politics, and ethnicized mobilization are common themes in Abdel Aziz al-Hilu’s SPLM-N insurgency. As Sudan expert Julie Flint has tirelessly reiterated throughout the South Kordofan crisis, past Nuba insurgencies, rather than their Darfuri counterparts, may be the more effective historical comparison: in terms of military operations, political terrain, and insurgency objectives, the SPLM-N’s current activities mirror the 1991-5 Nuba Mountains insurgency, as does Khartoum’s response. The strategic dynamics of counterinsurgency warfare, however, have shifted drastically. Whereas the Nuba insurgency occurred as an ugly sub-conflict of the broader North/South civil war, the SPLM-N’s current insurgency has higher political stakes for Khartoum. Between the prospect of widespread military defections, looming financial collapse, and an increasingly powerful, multi-ethnic rebel alliance, the insurgency’s sustainability is a key factor in the NCP regime’s internal stability. But, judging from the SPLM-N’s statements, as well as the operational dynamics of the conflict, the Nuba insurgents are interested in political transformation, rather than state capture; this differs substantially from the late Khalil Ibrahim’s JEM insurgency, which, in 2008, tried to take the proverbial party to Khartoum.

That’s the national overlay. On a localized level, the conflict dynamics are, of course, much more complicated than Kristof’s tactical analysis would suggest. By this point, the disaggregated Darfur narrative is well-known: the apex of the Sudan advocacy movement (the April 2006 rally, by most judgments) coincided with the complication of political violence in Darfur. Janjaweed militias, accurately described as the political vessels of mass atrocity, began to splinter. By 2008/2009, the majority of civilian deaths stemmed from violence between Arab militias, rather than between the Darfuri insurgencies and the Sudanese armed/proxy forces. In South Kordofan, localized conflict dynamics present a similarly complicated picture, this time with a positive twist: while most of the fighting has occurred in the province’s northeastern population centers, previously antagonistic Nuba, Misseriya, and Dagu leaders have resolved localized conflicts through community-based peacebuilding processes, allowing credible mechanisms for conflict resolution.

Needless to say, Kristof mentioned very few of these details in his column, which focused on the short-term humanitarian components of the South Kordofan crisis. Unfortunately, it’s too easy to read Kristof’s column and say, “well, jeez, the guy has 800 words and wants to call people to action–what else is he supposed to do?” (call me on the straw man, if you’d like, but I’d say it’s an appropriate characterization). Here’s my answer: this. For those uninterested in clicking through, the hyperlink sends you to a June 2011 Guardian article by Julie Flint, which contextualizes the civilian protection crisis within the national, regional, and local political dynamics I described above. Okay, she clocks in at 998 words, but she cites applicable historical Nuba insurgency models, contextualizes the humanitarian crisis, and, Le Gasp, quotes conflict actors, rather than victims. As Flint observed in a November Sudan brief, the humanitarian lens with which we have perceived the South Kordofan crisis has significantly impeded our ability to find a political solution to a political crisis. Until we can transcend our cognitive moral crutch, both human rights advocates and policymakers will make little progress towards ensuring sustainable civilian protection, conflict resolution, and political transformation in Sudan.

In my past two posts on the disaggregation of mass atrocities prevention, I addressed two components of our present understanding of the field: the moral teleology of atrocities termination research, and the need for an expanded concept of policy leverage’s role in preventive action. I based my conclusions on Alex de Waal, Jens Meierhenrich, and Bridget Conley-Zilkic’s excellent Fletcher Forum essay on the intellectual paucity of the contemporary atrocities prevention project. The essay eviscerates the multi-level cognitive failure of the atrocities prevention community: with aggregated, un-nuanced research, academic perceptions of genocide’s origins and evolution impact policy officials’ decision-making processes, creating an unproductive and, frequently, irresponsible insulated feedback loop. At their core, the contemporary failings of atrocities prevention policy are cognitive, founded in an understandable, perceptive bias towards simplification, gratification, and accessibility.

The essay’s third section addresses the “ethical imperative” underlining our current perception of atrocities termination. De Waal et al. appropriately cite a diplomatic scuffle between US/UN ambassador Susan Rice and then-US/Sudan envoy Scott Gration over the trajectory of atrocities in Darfur. In 2009, Gration categorized Khartoum’s “coordinated” genocidal campaign in Darfur as complete, in contrast to Rice’s (and the U.S. government’s) insistence on the “ongoing genocide” in Sudan’s western province. For the Sudan advocacy community, Gration’s statement demonstrated the rocky road towards the Obama administration’s delayed Sudan policy, placed in stark contrast to the Bush administration’s near-decade of moral certitude and condemnation. From a statistical perspective, Gration was correct: a 2010 Lancet epidemiological survey of Darfur mortality rates (ungated) placed the October 2007-December 2008 death count at 2,160–indicating a sustained, exponential decline in atrocities–and by 2010, inter-communal conflict had supplanted civilian-targeted atrocities as the primary cause of conflict-related death in Darfur. But, lest Stalin’s age-old, too-oft-quoted adage be reinforced, advocates reverted to the “genocidal duck rule“: if it walks like genocide and quacks like genocide, it’s probably genocide.

The genocidal duck rule lies at the heart of our current perception of mass atrocities prevention and termination. In the case of Darfur, advocates understand IDP and refugee camps as integrally intertwined with genocide and mass atrocities, a symptom of a similar, systematic crisis. Under de Waal et al.’s (appropriate) assessment, the rule demonstrates a cognitive bias towards normative, rather than positive analysis. The perceptive continuity between acute violence and the sustained suffering of displaced persons necessitates a convergence in policy goals, objectives, and mechanisms. Economic and political sanctions, which previously served as a short-term mechanism for incentivized decision-making, become a long-term point of leverage against the Sudanese regime, to be removed only after a comprehensive, inclusive solution to the displacement crisis is achieved. Never-mind that acute violence and displacement result from differentiated policy objectives and incentives; at a cognitive level, the duck rule reinforces persistence of political evil, with little room for dynamic evolution. As in the case of Nick Kristof’s latest column (more on this in a later post), policy analysis is reduced to the thematic (Ahmed Harun’s overlapping presence in Darfur and South Kordofan) and the tactical (the actions of a genocidal counterinsurgency campaign), rather than the strategic (the Khartoum regime’s varied political motivations, regime stability concerns, and the like). As de Waal et al. suggest, the more minute “political marketplace” of violence is under-emphasized, with prevention advocates focusing unrealistic expectations on cataclysmic regime shifts.

Why does this happen? After two decades of substantive, valuable criticism on the moral hazards and political shortcomings of international human rights advocacy, why does our perception of mass atrocities remain stifled and un-nuanced? As I’ve mentioned, de Waal et al. view cognitive bias as the primary explanatory mechanism. The criticism is appropriate, but insufficient. Cognitive failure can create poor analysis, but its impact on the policymaking process is indirect, due to the varied, multi-actor nature of organizational decision-making. Rather, policy failures represent the confluence of cognitive failures and exclusive, siloed organizational cultures. To use Philip Tetlock’s cognitive-actor model, human rights organizations’ liberal ideological commitments prioritize “human rights hedgehogs”–committed ideologists–over “foxes,” who adopt critical analysis and flexible thought. As Severine Autesserre describes in her latest analysis of “dominant narratives” and policy interventions in the DRC (ungated), human rights bureaucracies, including advocacy organizations, policymaking bodies, and international institutions, continuously reinforce ideological rigidity, marginalizing policy dissent. For the atrocities prevention enthusiast, non-competitive, non-disruptive conflict analysis is an easier, more reliable course of action than the disaggregated, cautionary narrative. In an industry that places morality over politics, action over caution, and universalism over nuance, cognitive biases are easily reinforced, with problematic consequences for policy action.

In addition to the Intervention Ratchet’s Lexicon series, this post is the last in a three-part assessment of contemporary narratives of mass atrocities prevention and genocide termination, sparked by de Waal et al.’s essay. You can read the first two parts here and here.

Let’s review: in my last post, I riffed on de Waal, Meierhenrich, and Conley-Zilkic’s analytical notion of a “teleology of mass atrocities prevention.” Addressing the “texture” of Holocaust memory in public discourse, I expanded on the notion of a moral mass atrocities narrative, with broad implications for policymaking, public perceptions of genocide and mass atrocities, and academic research. I addressed the emergence of psychological and anthropological experimental research on mass atrocities, noting its under-prioritization of political institutions and incentives. I referenced Meierhenrich’s model of disaggregated atrocities research as a path for further investigation, understanding, and nuance.

The second part of de Waal et al.’s essay concerns our “epistemological” understanding of mass atrocities response policy–that is, the boundaries of our atrocities termination knowledge. What works, and how do we know? As I mentioned in my first post, our cognitive perception of mass atrocities–as an exclusively moral stain on the human conscience, rather than a complex, multi-level web of political, economic, and social interactions–has led to a myriad of methodological missteps in assessing atrocities termination. In the present-day policy discourse on mass atrocities, as before, false dichotomies are commonplace: intervention will end mass atrocities, while non-intervention will encourage their continuation. Similarly, selection bias abounds: when Samantha Power writes on the failure of U.S. policy intervention in mass atrocities, she identifies the most egregious instances of institutional, organizational, and policy failures; on the other side, when David Rieff condemns the folly of human rights advocacy, he relies on a cursory selection of flawed interventions and disastrous consequences. Opposing viewpoints present each other’s ideological commitments as slippery slopes: for anti-interventionists, R2P paves an inevitable path towards military intervention, while R2P advocates’ understanding of realism wholly precludes the implementation of civilian protection policy. Each assertion encapsulates fragments of truth (as with all logical fallacies), but it’s the perception that counts.

In constructing an “epistemology” of mass atrocities termination, de Waal et al. reiterate the need for disaggregated research. As in the case of mass atrocities’ emergence, civil war research is about a decade and a half ahead of the game. Qualitative and quantitative assessments of civil war termination are critical components of the comparative politics arsenal, underlining the various roles of negotiated political settlements, peacekeeping operations, and decisive military victories in facilitating sustainable peace. Given the overlap between conflict- and atrocities-oriented preventive policy tools, the civil war research may be particularly useful as a foundation for atrocities termination. Indeed, de Waal et al.’s preliminary termination models bear a striking similarity to the civil war literature’s standard frameworks: decisive victory, limited victory, regime fragmentation, and third-party intervention all feature prominently in existing models of civil war termination.

A disaggregated approach to assessing mass atrocities termination yields important conclusions for human rights policymakers, who seek to avoid the false dualism of “humanitarian intervention.” Throughout the past two decades, domestic and international approaches to human rights policy have improved, allowing for the emergence of “smarter,” more targeted forms of economic, political, and diplomatic statecraft. While the effectiveness of these “new” policy tools is uncertain (see, for example, Dan Drezner’s study on “smart sanctions” policy), one thing is clear: in contrast to third-party military interventions, they generally don’t exacerbate the short-term prospect of mass atrocities. That may not sound like much, but, for a field of policy intervention with a particular concern for the “do no harm” principle, the avoidance of unintended consequences can determine the continued operational legitimacy of human rights doctrine.

However, in spite of the narrative strength of de Waal et al.’s disaggregated atrocities termination model, the international, regional, and national policy implications remain implicit. Each framework provides a different nexus of incentives, institutions, and decisions that may lead to atrocities termination, with foggy, unarticulated entry points for third-party actors. It’s clear, then, that a complicated epistemology of mass atrocities termination is insufficient: in addition to the “how do atrocities end?”, “who ends them?” is also worth asking. As Bec Hamilton implies, Samantha Power’s concept of third-party intervention in mass atrocities developed in a different international system, where U.S. hegemony tangibly coincided with dominant, credible influence in national, regional, and international affairs. If, as Anne-Marie Slaughter suggests, international actors are operating in a networked world, we need different metrics for policy effectiveness, particularly when concerned with the prevention and termination of mass atrocities.

In a recent, inspired Twitter rant, Jay Ulfelder decried the general lack of specificity in calls for third-party policy intervention: “Instead of waving hands at “int’l community,” need to specify who would do what, & how that cooperation would get started.” Expanded beyond 140 characters, Ulfelder’s complaint demonstrates the crucial, underemphasized role of leverage in our contemporary understanding of mass atrocities response policy. To a limited degree, the emergence of regional organizations (ECOWAS and the Arab League, for example) has underlined the evolving disaggregation of third-party intervention. Western actors–that is, the states with the most change-oriented foreign policy outlooks–possess a waning monopoly on political and economic incentives, including arms transactions, security assistance, and trade policy. Depending on your metrics of economic and political development, China may or may not be catching up to the United States, but its mounting relative influence over authoritarian regimes in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia is largely indisputable.

Thus far, research on leverage and mass atrocities has been case study-based, or anecdotal. In the spirit of not-reinventing-the-wheel, democratization researchers have outlined a workable metric for the relationship between leverage, linkage (the social, political, economic, and cultural relationship between the third-party actor and the democratizing state), and the effectiveness of international democratization policy.* Levitsky and Way’s leverage framework relies on three characteristics of state-to-state interaction: relative levels of third-party political and economic strength; the existence of competing foreign policy priorities (for example, the impact of Manas air base on U.S. human rights policy in Kyrgyzstan); and the counterbalancing influence of regional and international actors. Given the trajectory of international policy inaction on Sudan and Syria, to name a couple, Levitsky and Way’s leverage metrics may be a valuable mechanism for the disaggregation of mass atrocities response policy research, as well as a more nuanced approach to policy intervention in mass atrocities.

In addition to the Intervention Ratchet’s Lexicon series, this post is the second in a three-part assessment of contemporary narratives of mass atrocities prevention and genocide termination, sparked by de Waal et al.’s essay. You can read the first part here. Check back in a couple of days for the third installment, which will address the mass atrocities prevention community and the organizational-cultural challenge of disaggregating mass atrocities prevention.

* Hat-tip: to Jay Ulfelder for the Levitsky and Way reference.

Things were going well for [Abdullahi Hassan] until just over a month ago when the last major bank in Minnesota to offer money transfers to Somalia shut down the service, fearful it could be prosecuted under US anti-terrorism laws.

US authorities are concerned that money sent to Somalia could end up in the hands of al-Shabab, an insurgent group with links to al-Qaeda which controls large parts of Somalia, and which is classed as a terrorist group by the US.

“I used to get $100 [£62] a month from my aunt,” says Mr Hassan.

“I had a reasonably good life, but now it’s really difficult for me because of the circumstances in America,” he explains.

“I cannot pay my rent, I cannot pay for food or for school fees. I was dependent on my aunt for everything–there is no other way for me to get money.

Needless to say, Somalia continues to struggle with food security, economic development, and political instability. The consequences of remittance termination were entirely foreseeable–last December, lobbying against remittance restrictions, Oxfam advocates described the potential impact of revenue flows as “disastrous.” As Ken Menkhaus observed, Somalia’s informal hawala money management system mitigated the 2011 famine’s humanitarian impact, serving as a local, sustained lifeline for communities unable to access international aid actors.

The remittance question isn’t an easy one–as Elu and Price indicate (ungated), there is at least some evidence that remittance flows provide financial resources to terrorism networks in sub-Saharan Africa. But Somalia is a unique case, due to the central state’s weakness, the civil society potential of the hawala system, and the Somali diaspora community’s substantial role in the country’s political, economic, and social development. Funds from the Somali diaspora amount to more than one-fifth of the country’s GDP, underlying the critical role of remittance flows in sustaining livelihoods, promoting growth, and ensuring human development in the Horn.

If the United States is interested in promoting a sustainable solution to Somalia’s present crisis, rather than perpetuating an endless, if useful shadow war against Shabaab insurgents, a human security perspective towards counterterrorism is indisputably relevant. Hawala networks represent a potent, generally nonviolent, and legitimate mechanism for civil society mobilization; in their absence, al-Shabaab’s localized governance, political Islamism, and internal revenue networks can consolidate their authority.

Alex de Waal, Jens Meierhenrich, and Bridget Conley-Zilkic, three genocide scholars, have penned an exceptional essay on the analytical shortcomings of the present discourse on mass atrocities prevention. Disaggregating historical models of atrocities termination, de Waal, Meierhenrich, and Conley-Zilkic complicate popular trends in atrocities scholarship. The authors outline three dominant characteristics of the “genocide and mass atrocities” narrative: the teleological sliding scale of genocide’s emergence, the epistemological assumption of military intervention’s effectiveness, and the subsequent ethical imperative underlying our cognitive perceptions of mass atrocities. For the authors, the policy-based, moral, and analytical fixation on the Holocaust and Rwanda as historical atrocity models lays the foundation for a deterministic, static paradigm for prevention:

In its simplest form this ["essentialist logic of violence"] seen as a graduated scale of warnings of genocide that corral the full complexity of conflict and inter-ethnic relations into a one-dimensional slippery slope that leads inexorably to genocide, and reduce the varied instrumental political logics of violence to evil motive alone. These cases model only two possible outcomes: either a completed extermination of the target group or an external military intervention to bring an end to the killing.

The essay is worth reading in full. Given this blog’s focus on mass atrocities prevention and policy, I’m planning over the next week to address each component of de Waal, Meierhenrich, and Conley-Zilkic’s analysis, starting with an assessment of the “teleology of mass atrocities.” The authors’ conclusions are apt, but generally unattributed, and I’d like to expand on their analysis of literature trends, cognitive narratives, and these narratives’ implications for policy formation and implementation.

So, to the teleology. It’s worth starting our assessment with James Young’s “texture of memory”–that is, the ways in which public discourse, memorial institutions, and narratives shape our collective understanding of the Holocaust, in particular. During high school, I spent two summers working as an education intern at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, the city’s relatively nascent Holocaust memorial museum. Compared to its counterparts in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Jerusalem, MoJH sits squarely in the middle of the “Jewish particularism vs. Holocaust universalism” spectrum. The core exhibition progresses chronologically, but also thematically: the first floor emphasizes the cultural origins of Eastern European Jewry, where the third floor focuses on the moral universalization of the Holocaust. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s interactive, cinematic, and LA-style Museum of Tolerance, on the other hand, features a “Tolerance Center,” transferring the Holocaust’s moral lessons to postwar and contemporary civil rights, human rights, and anti-bigotry struggles; similarly, DC’s US Holocaust Memorial Museum hosts “From Memory to Action,” a semi-permanent exhibit on post-Holocaust mobilization surrounding mass atrocities prevention and international human rights.

The moral project of Holocaust remembrance underlines public perceptions of subsequent crises, united under the essential ethics of common human dignity and justice. See, for example, President Obama’s 2009 Holocaust Remembrance Day address at the DC Holocaust museum, which articulates the post-Holocaust, moral stain of mass atrocities: [W]e have the opportunity to make a habit of empathy, to recognize ourselves in each other, to commit ourselves to resisting injustice and intolerance and indifference…[by] doing everything we can to prevent and end atrocities like those that took place in Rwanda, those taking place in Darfur.” The moral narrative of mass atrocities demonstrates de Waal et al.’s “graduated scale” of early warning and preventive opportunity; the “lessons-learned” understanding of humanity’s universal, collective responsibility offers little distinction between the rights hierarchy. Under this ethical logic, hate-crime prevention and anti-bigotry education are the natural, fluid counterparts to atrocities prevention–as de Waal et al. observe, the resulting narrative is “one-dimensional,” defined by genocide’s inevitable emergence. Thus, the teleology: if we perceive genocide or large-scale atrocities as the unavoidable end-point of political violence, our cognitive approach to policy formation and implementation becomes maximalist. Resolving localized outbreaks, internal political disputes, and regional divisions becomes a moot point, because the perpetrator’s underlying immorality transcends the political power of short-term, non-coercive interventions.

Under the moral narrative of mass atrocities, conscientious policymakers bear overwhelming responsibility for the prevention of the world’s worst crimes; transgressions against said responsibility are redeemable through decisive displays of courageous, moral leadership. Again, the teleology of mass atrocities prevention is in play. Political leadership emerges as a rough approximation of Godwin’s Law: as atrocity events escalate, the probability of an ahistorical, misappropriated comparison to past atrocities approaches 1. The penchant for non-rigorous, comparative analysis undermines responsible discourse and, at the formation level, intervention: conflict resolution approaches become “intervention by analogy,” an inexcusably shoddy model for public policy. Rwanda 1994 is no longer Rwanda 1994, but an unhappy synergy of Somalia 1993 and Rwanda 1994; Libya 2011 is no longer Libya 2011, but a misplaced moral reflection on Rwanda 1994, Darfur 2004, and Libya 2011; etcetera.

Public textures of atrocity memory carry significant relevance for academic and policy understandings of mass atrocities, not least because high-level policymakers perceive and depict the common policymaking discourse on mass atrocities through a moral lens. The field of anthropology has long fixated on the social origins of inter-communal conflict, violence, and atrocities memory (for an excellent example, see Liisa Malkki’s Purity and Exile, a field study of ethnic politics in the aftermath , constructed through the lens of Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania). Over the past decade, sociocultural anthropologists have proposed an “anthropology of genocide,” which probes the social foundations of dehumanization, “Otherization,” and inter-communal animosity. Similarly, two decades of experimental research on the collective and individual psychology of mass atrocities, victimization, and perpetration has extended academia’s perceptions of atrocities’ social origins.

Disaggregated, socially-oriented research is important, particularly for policy and programmatic approaches to trauma relief, post-conflict reconciliation, and restorative justice. But, for public perspectives on mass atrocities, the “socialization” of genocide research possesses an unfortunate side-effect: an over-emphasis on social dynamics, perceptions of the “Other,” and the “psychology of evil” de-politicizes mass atrocities, reducing the social phenomena to easily replicable models of “eliminationism” (to use Daniel Goldhagen’s uniquely unhelpful term). Anthropological and psychological frameworks for genocide and mass atrocities explain how individuals and groups mobilize against civilians, and how basic, human goodness declines into the world’s worst crime. But they don’t explain why. Crucial questions remain: Why do political institutions perpetrate atrocities? How do atrocities expand, limit, and perpetuate national, regional, and local political priorities? Justice, empathy, and human dignity are important, but the moral narrative of mass atrocities doesn’t begin to address the incentives and disincentives that transform institutional actors into perpetrators, third-party bystanders into interveners, and targeted communities into victims.

In carving a path forward for non-teleological research, de Waal et al. reference Meierhenrich’s disaggregated framework for atrocities termination, presumably present in his forthcoming Oxford introductory surveys. Meierhenrich differentiates between three characteristics of genocide’s emergence: genocidal acts, which are one-off instances of massacre (periodic outbreaks of ethnicized violence in northern Nigeria, for example); genocidal campaigns, which may include instrumentalist forms of genocide-by-counterinsurgency, genocide-by-resistance, and genocide-by-occupation (de Waal et al. cite the Ethiopian Red Terror as one such example); and genocidal regimes, whose existence, survival, and political legitimacy is reliant on a genocidal ideology (Hutu Power in Rwanda, Germany’s Nazi regime). In some sense, Meierhenrich’s model represents a confluence of trends within the larger research literature on conflict emergence and political violence. Large-scale genocide studies, such as Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil, have disaggregated historical models of mass atrocity throughout time, rather than Meierhenrich’s institutional distinctions. Meanwhile, advances in data collection technology (geographic information systems, especially) have allowed civil war researchers to prioritize the spatial disaggregation of conflict onset, duration, and termination (see, in particular, Cederman and Gleditsch’s 2009 JCR issue on “disaggregating civil war” (ungated), including excellent papers on ethnic marginalization, absolute/relative economic disparity, and geographic terrain, all gated). Atrocities analysis might apply a similar research model, using GIS data to trace complex local, regional, and national overlays of violence to determine the trajectory of and interaction between genocidal episodes.

In addition to the Intervention Ratchet’s Lexicon series, this post is the first in a three-part assessment of contemporary narratives of mass atrocities prevention and genocide termination, sparked by de Waal et al.’s essay. Check back in a couple of days for the second installment, which will address the “epistemological assumption” and its implications for policy formation.

Hat-tips: to AIPR’s Alex Zucker, for the essay recommendation; and, to Holger Schmidt, my Georgetown professor, for the “disaggregated civil war” literature.

In mid-January, U.S. special envoy Princeton Lyman warned of a “looming humanitarian disaster” in Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. In March, a devastating famine is poised to hit the conflict-ridden border states, sparked by an ugly convergence of political violence and government-imposed restrictions on humanitarian relief operations. The famine will likely affect half a million Sudanese, according to USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS-NET).

Recognizing the potential for humanitarian catastrophe, the U.S. State Department has launched an aggressive diplomatic campaign, urging the Sudanese government to allow international humanitarian operations to return to South Kordofan and Blue Nile. Khartoum hasn’t budged, and the prospect of interstate conflict between Sudan and South Sudan will only increase the NCP’s inertia towards international humanitarian engagement within its borders. For a regime concerned about its internal political stability, the presence of international organizations–that is, more non-Sudanese personnel, more transparency, and, subsequently, more accountability–is an unpalatable possibility.

Noting the preliminary failure of unilateral and multilateral diplomatic outreach, Amb. Lyman’s office offered a brief consideration of stronger measures, including the unilateral distribution of food supplies and humanitarian assistance. In a multi-organization letter, the Sudan advocacy community has endorsed the policy approach, calling for “concrete steps outside the diplomatic realm” to facilitate humanitarian access, aid distribution, and unfettered population flows. The multi-organization letter cites a variety of humanitarian aid interventions throughout the 1980s and ’90s, including the ’85 Ethiopia airdrops and Operation Lifeline Sudan, as potential models for escalated action. The letter utilizes the catch-all term, “cross-border operations,” to describe the internationally-facilitated, non-consensual distribution of aid throughout South Kordofan and Blue Nile. An affiliated blog post called for the implementation of multiple “humanitarian corridors” throughout South Kordofan and Blue Nile.

Despite dismissing “logistical and political concerns,” the multi-organizational letter does not articulate the mechanics of a cross-border humanitarian aid operation. The procedural ambiguities are understandable–the goal of the letter is to build consensus, political will, and a framework for mobilization, rather than to guide administrative policy implementation. However, given the complex, multi-faceted nature of relief aid distribution in conflict-affected zones, the cross-border operation’s mechanics, political challenges, and potential hazards are worth considering.

Humanitarian aid operations range widely in their implementation, based on the degree of consensual participation by the state authority, the enormity of the humanitarian crisis, and the existing aid infrastructure within the crisis-affected area. In general, approaches to humanitarian crises in conflict zones bear greater similarity to each other than to those in disaster-affected, but otherwise stable crisis areas. Violent conflict compounds humanitarian aid delivery’s existing political complications, as allegedly neutral aid actors engage with and rely on less-than-savory insurgencies, government forces, and paramilitary operatives for logistical support and protection. If humanitarian actors, including third-party facilitators, fail to implement appropriate supply chain accountability measures, aid materials and food resources may sustain local military actors, as occurred during Ethiopia’s 1984-5 famine.

In the midst of political violence, cross-border, non-consensual aid operations frequently morph, shifting from a supply distribution initiative towards a militarized stability operation. To begin with, the politics of humanitarian assistance provide aid organizations with an unresolvable moral dilemma: accede to the central polity’s coercive, anti-humanitarian restrictions, or withdraw. Cross-border aid interventions seek to mitigate existing instability, providing a coercive cover for the distribution of assistance and supplies. For a conflict environment, the establishment of reinforced humanitarian corridors remains the only mechanism to secure the continued protection of humanitarian actors and crisis-affected populations. Airdrops and clandestine support to humanitarian organizations are, at best, piecemeal approaches to systemic crises.

If fluctuating government and rebel authorities had not previously facilitated the militarization of aid distribution operations, the establishment of a humanitarian corridor likely will. In 1992, the US-led United Task Force deployed to Somalia to secure the protection of humanitarian aid organizations, transporting thousands of tons of aid materials across the Kenyan border. Far from eliminating the security threat, Operation Restore Hope ensured the continuation of attacks against humanitarian workers and operations. With Farrah Haidid’s forces plundering, exploiting, and manipulating humanitarian actors, UNITAF established a civilian-military joint unit, responsible for overseeing aid distribution and civilian protection. However, standard operating procedures, civilian protection priorities, and logistical dynamics clashed, ensuring the continued dominance of military priorities, which failed to create sustained space for civilian, non-coercive humanitarian operations.

Of course, Somalia represents a worst-case scenario: the scale of sectarian conflict, terrain, waning political will, and the local dynamics of humanitarian mobilization throughout Operation Restore Hope are by no means illustrative of the standard, day-to-day challenges of aid distribution. Indeed, the multi-organizational letter makes no reference to the botched, internationally humiliating Somalia intervention. So, let’s take a look at a cross-border operation that the letter references: Operation Lifeline Sudan, the three-phase, UN-coordinated cross-border relief operation. Beginning in 1988, OLS occurred at the apex of Sudan’s (second) north/south civil war, preceding emerging SPLM schisms and the sudden collapse of the al-Mahdi regime in Khartoum. OLS’ initial phases occurred in the context of tenuous, negotiated consensus between the central Sudanese government, the SPLM, and the international community. The first two phases of the operation, prior to Omar al-Bashir’s 1989 coup, represented a distinct, if replicated approach to complex emergency response, where the conflict actors functioned as the primary arbiters of security in crisis-affected areas.

Sudan’s current security situation bear little resemblance to OLS’ permissive environment. As I mentioned above, the NCP is increasingly wary of Western-, UN-, and NGO-affiliated actors, particularly in its unstable, insurgency-ridden border provinces. A negotiated, consensual relief operation is an unlikely, perhaps impossible prospect. Coercive force would be a necessary element of a cross-border operation, which third-party actors would likely launch from South Sudan. The UNITAF operation, which deployed in response to a famine of similar magnitude, included 37,000 personnel, 25,000 of whom were American. AFRICOM’s Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. military’s only base in the region, supports 3,500 military and civilian personnel, rendering a unilateral intervention an unlikely task. From a multilateral perspective, it’s difficult to imagine the composition of an intervening force. UNMISS, the UN peacekeeping force in South Sudan, possesses no operational mandate in South Kordofan or Blue Nile, and would need UN Security Council approval to expand its reach to Sudan’s border regions. After last weekend’s Syria fiasco, as well as the SPLM-N’s recent kerfuffle with China’s construction operations in South Kordofan, the miraculous emergence of a non-consensual peacekeeping operation within Sudan’s territorial boundaries seems unlikely. The South Sudanese are hardly worth mentioning–between Bashir’s saber-rattling and the recent oil production freeze, the last thing Juba wants is a large-scale ground invasion.

For the moment, let’s side-step the practicality questions; is a cross-border operation a good idea? That is, would a cross-border operation in South Kordofan and Blue Nile facilitate marked improvements in the lives of Sudanese? It’s not an easy question. At a first glance, the absence of humanitarian aid delivery will be disastrous, amounting to the willful negligence of half a million civilian lives. But, seen from a larger perspective, the consequences of decisive intervention would be far, far worse. According to colleagues in the aid community, non-consensual aid delivery operations often jeopardize the integrity of humanitarian assistance, particularly given OLS’ complex legacy. Aid workers and local populations would become vulnerable to accusations of sheltering the SPLM-N insurgency, further aggravating the human security environment in the border regions. The international humanitarian aid community maintains a broad infrastructure throughout Sudan, particularly in Darfur, where hundreds of thousands of IDPs remain dependent on UN and NGO assistance. Food insecurity affects a much broader swath of the country’s population–in 2011, more than five million people throughout Sudan received World Food Program assistance. As the ICC indictment controversy indicated, the NCP regime needs few excuses the initiate retaliatory attacks and restrictive measures against aid operations in Darfur.

As in most cases, the appropriate approach to Sudan’s humanitarian crisis must be comprehensive. On its face, a cross-border intervention is a compelling notion, but offers few mechanisms for the country-wide redress of Sudanese instability and food insecurity.

But, for better or worse, it was an opportunity for international consensus, as well as an entry point for further collective action. The crisis reached a tipping point last night, when Syrian forces massacred over 250 civilians across the country, especially in the protest-heavy city of Homs. Especially with Homs in the backdrop, international actors did not perceive the resolution as the be-all-end-all of civilian protection policy in Syria. However, today’s failure at Turtle Bay has caused more diplomatic disarray, more uncertainty, and has lowered the prospects for an effective political resolution to Syria’s crisis. Russia and China may not have “betrayed” the Syrian people, as Human Rights Watch observed in a press release earlier today, but their intransigence is remarkably “disempowering” (friend-of-the-blog Sean Langberg‘s words, not mine).

Of course, the UN Security Council’s failure has cued a new stream of calls for military intervention in Syria, underlined by an unfortunately deterministic vocabulary (“inevitable” has proven aggravatingly persistent, especially following Michael Weiss’ January op-ed). The logic of “last resort” military action is simple and, on its face, morally convincing: the international community has engaged in every credible policy mechanism to ensure civilian protection and, more broadly, political transition; at its core, the UN Security Council is an institution of “last resort”, responsible for mobilizing collective action where individual diplomacy fails; in the absence of reliable, decisive Security Council action, the international community–whether the United States, the Arab League, or Turkey–must uphold the mantle of liberal foreign policy and universal values.

For Shadi Hamid and Anne-Marie Slaughter, two respected policy experts and supporters of military intervention in Syria (generally, in the form of a “humanitarian corridor”/”safe zone”), it’s not just a matter of civilian protection; the credibility of the international moral project, underlined by the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, is at stake. For Hamid, if the international community cannot operationalize R2P in Syria, then the doctrine “is just an idea, and not a reality.” Well, yes! The relative success of NATO’s Libya intervention has established a false standard of successful R2P implementation. A policy doctrine can provide a powerful framework for international mobilization, but, like all aspects of international politics, it’s not a self-perpetuating force. The international community’s failure to intervene in Syria will not cast R2P into Hades’ Room of Unrealized Concepts–rather, Syria demonstrates that we need to improve our mechanisms for preventive diplomacy and early warning, in order to avoid the perpetual round of insubstantial, failed Security Council negotiations.

And, from a broader perspective, Syria is a poor, poor model for “last resort” intervention. As I’ve written, a military intervention in Syria, particularly one undertaken by Arab League and Turkish forces, would likely damage, rather than improve R2P’s credibility. A quick glance at the ICISS report, R2P’s framing document, suggests Evans and Sahnoun’s broad agreement with this assessment. Outlining the preconditions for a successful, just, and responsible R2P intervention, the ICISS framers write:

In particular, a military action for limited human protection purposes cannot be justified if in the process it triggers a larger conflict. It will be the case that some human beings simply cannot be rescued except at unacceptable cost–perhaps of a larger regional conflagration, involving major military powers. In such cases, however painful the reality, coercive military action is no longer justified.

In a masterful critique of the R2P doctrine’s application in Syria, Dan Trombly addressed the folly of the “military intervention = regional stability” logic. I don’t agree with Trombly’s dismissive analysis of R2P’s normative evolution, but he has it right: the “second and third order” effects of an international intervention in Syria would be catastrophic for regional stability. Jackson Diehl’s speculations on the prospect of an emerging sectarian war across the Middle East confirm these stability-oriented concerns about “last resort” intervention in Syria. From a larger civilian protection perspective, there are few credible technical or operational indications that a humanitarian corridor, safe zone, no-fly zone, no-fly zone, or cross-border humanitarian aid delivery operation would alleviate Syria’s dire human security situation. In this circumstance, a “last resort” intervention would likely be irresponsible, rather than a fulfillment of the R2P doctrine.

What, then, is to be done? I haven’t had enough time to consider the post-veto policy options, but CFR’s Robert Danin offered some valuable, pre-UNSC proposals in late January, including an ICC indictment for Assad’s inner circle, stronger sanctions on the Assad-friendly Aleppo and Damascus business communities (the regime’s primary patronage networks), and the establishment of a coordinated “Friends of Syria” group. Indeed, much of the policy commentary remains speculative–see, for example, Daniel Serwer’s quick (but comprehensive) post on the post-veto landscape:

What the United States, Europe and the Arab League need to do now is to keep up the pressure by maintaining and tightening sanctions, redeploying the observers if it is safe enough to do so and encouraging continued nonviolent protest in forms (boycotts in particular) that do not expose large numbers of people to the regime’s violence.  They also need to consider new measures:  blockade of arms shipments?  extension of the financial sanctions used against Iran to Syria?  Reinforcement of the Arab League observers?

I’ll continue to update this page as additional policy resources flow in.

In addition to the regional/military expertise nexus, I’d toss the advocacy realm into the equation. I applaud the Truman National Security Project for their attempt to promote greater understanding of the military and intelligence services among progressive foreign policy advocates, but the human rights community remains largely unfamiliar with the complex dynamics of coercive resource restraints, institutional inertia, and interest-based foreign policy decision-making. For advocates, Eric Martin’s “intervention ratchet” is an all-too-easy process, underlined by a buzzword-level understanding of the defense/security lexicon.

This blog is targeted towards the human rights community, rather than the defense/security folks. In that spirit, I’d like to use this page as a crowd-sourced resource: What terms–”military intervention,” “no-fly zone,” “cross-border operation”–underline the intervention ratchet? Which case studies would you use to exemplify the policy’s mechanics and potential shortcomings? I’ll use this page as a home-base for an expanded series, tagged “The Intervention Ratchet’s Lexicon,” which will serve as a resource for human rights advocates interested in coercive policy interventions.

Cross-Border Operations:

• Humanitarian aid distribution and famine relief in Sudan.

Mass Atrocities Prevention:

• On the teleological, moral narrative of mass atrocities, and how it prevents us from stopping them.
• The leverage metric and the disaggregation of mass atrocities response policy.
• Human-rights organizational cultures and misperceptions of mass atrocities.

The book in and of itself is a powerful, inspiring feat: Judt completed each of his Snyder dialogues while dying from ALS. In spite of his physical paralysis, Judt’s mind remained vivid. As Snyder wrote on in the days following the historian’s death, reflecting of Judt’s three decades of intellectual leadership: “All of this he had achieved on his own terms, rebelling when he liked and against whom he liked, always defining himself as an outsider. I think that the disease made that distinction between insider and outsider, though important to Tony throughout his life, much less relevant. Trapped inside his own body, he went outside of himself in a way that he had never done before.” During the two years following Judt’s diagnosis, the historian remained as prolific, incisive, and compelling as ever, publishing powerful reflections on his ideological experiences with Marxism and Zionism, the Old/New Left transition, and the moral failings of contemporary democracy. Regardless of his illness, Judt’s memoirs are worth a thousand reads–they offer an important insight into a public intellectual’s “life of mind.”

In a way, Judt straddled his colleagues’ ideological transitions–his perspectives on social democracy, the folly of the New Left, and Zionism’s failings were consolidated visions of old debates, updated for a dynamic, networked twenty-first century. Judt’s intellectual style persistently evaded the Left’s epistemic closure, as exemplified in Past Imperfect and The Burden of Responsibility, his two-part reflection on the moral shortcomings (and, in Burden, triumphs) of twentieth-century French intellectual life. He was quick to apply his historical lessons to present-day moral discourse, roundly condemning the Left for its ideological complicity in neoconservatism’s rise.

Judt’s work has proved formative in my own intellectual development, more so than any other thinker. Judt’s thought isn’t particularly complex, but his parsimonious approach to public morality and political leadership makes his work all the more relevant. Judt sought to infuse American liberalism with a social-democratic ethic, reviving under-played discourses on collective responsibility and the public good. Most undergraduates read Postwar, Judt’s magnum opus, as a inconvenient burden of “Introduction to Comparative Politics”; in my senior year of high school, I read it as a compelling, practical case for collective action and common welfare. And, as controversial as they may have been, Judt’s thoughts on his own Jewish identity and his commitment to Zionism allowed me to consolidate my understanding of the irreconcilable relationship between cultural solidarity and secular virtue.

During my freshman year, as Judt released his first NYRB memoirs, I entertained the prospect of beginning a Tony Judt biography. I corresponded with Judt briefly, and he was kind enough to humor my lofty aspirations. It’s not an easy project, particularly for an undergraduate with little more than an amateur’s training in historical methodology. As Thinking likely demonstrates, Judt’s intellectual influences were broad, reaching from forerunners of socialist Zionism, to the champions of postwar British liberalism and French social democracy, to the democratization theorists of revolutionary Eastern Europe. Toss in 150 years of non-revolutionary Marxism, which undergirds the life-blood of social-democratic theory, and you have quite a mouthful for a passive enthusiast of left-wing thought. However, it remains a worthwhile project, not least because, between his Zionist youth leadership and his limited engagement with the Charter 77 movement, Judt lived his intellectual legacy.

The book is currently sitting on my living room table–I plan on reading it cover-to-cover when I come home from USHMM’s panel on international justice and the Nuremberg trials. I’ll post my thoughts this weekend, after having time to work through Thinking and to consolidate my thoughts. In the meantime, The Guardian (the brilliant Neal Ascherson, in particular), NPR, and The Atlantic have each offered thorough reviews of the book.

Judging from the Twitter livestream, much of the threat-assessment follow-up will focus on counterterrorism and counter-proliferation threats, with understandable regional emphases on Iran (the bomb), Afghanistan (the war), and the Middle East (the political transitions). As is often the case in discussions of U.S. strategy and foreign policy, sub-Saharan Africa will be sidelined, despite its growing functional role in the United States’ international strategic posture. In order to offset the traditional and blogosphere media bias, I thought I’d extract a couple of key points on the strategic threat assessment’s implications for U.S. foreign policy in sub-Saharan Africa:

Terrorism: Last year’s threat assessment devoted two clauses to U.S. counterterrorism priorities in sub-Saharan Africa–one on al-Shabaab (in Somalia), and one on the nascent AQIM (in the Sahel region). As regional counterterrorism initiatives have expanded, so has the U.S. intelligence community’s emphasis on the insurgencies’ strategic importance. On Somalia, the threat assessment underlines the core components of the United States’ multilateral counterterrorism strategy: consolidating territorial gains, limiting proxy mobilization, and building sustained security partnerships with local, anti-Shabaab militias. (Back in October, Dan Trombly and Daveed Gartenstein-Ross offered an apparently on-target analysis of the U.S. Somalia strategy, as well.)

While the IC’s increased emphasis on al-Shabaab and AQIM is of interest in and of itself, perhaps the most intriguing characteristic is the threat asssessment’s understanding of the relationship between al-Shabaab, AQIM, and other sub-regional insurgencies, like Boko Haram. Evidence of cooperation between Boko Haram, AQIM, and al-Shabaab has been scant, but that hasn’t stopped Nigerian, Nigerien, and U.S. security officials from underlining the operational and technical links between the three organizations. From the intelligence community’s perspective (or, that is, the winning intelligence agency’s perspective), the micro-politics of terrorism in sub-Saharan Africa remain locally and regionally oriented, with few of the global aspirations of their similarly-branded affiliates.

Regional Stability: The 2012 threat assessment’s emphasis on regional stability in sub-Saharan Africa is well-placed, and should be unsurprising for most Africa watchers. In a recent post on global political instability, Jay Ulfelder’s qualitative analysis of coup risk yielded a fortunately Bieber-list Top 40 list; 37 of the forty most coup-prone states lie on the African continent. There’s plenty of simmering to speak of–persistent instability in Sudan, South Sudan, Nigeria, and the Great Lakes Region–but the “African Spring”/”on the brink” commentary that characterizes popular coverage of political and social unrest in sub-Saharan Africa appears to be overblown.

Mass Atrocities: While previous threat assessments have underlined the relationship between mass atrocities prevention and U.S. international security priorities, Clapper’s 2012 testimony offers a fuller explanation of mass atrocities’ strategic implications. Clapper carefully avoids the chicken-and-egg fallacy of the “mass atrocities as a security threat” argument, noting the destructive governance, socioeconomic, and local political contexts for mass atrocities’ occurrence, particularly in Africa. In contrast to the sections on terrorism, proliferation, and cyber warfare, which prioritize current intelligence, Clapper’s mass atrocities section emphasizes the recent historical components of the IC’s approach to mass atrocities prevention. From a cynical perspective, the current/historical intelligence schism emphasizes the limited operational impact of PSD-10, President Obama’s August directive on mass atrocities prevention.