How can political instability make genocide more likely

Preventing genocide is one of the greatest challenges facing the international community.[1] Aside from the suffering and grief inflicted upon generations of people and the catastrophic social, economic and political dislocations that follow, this ‘crime of crimes’ has the potential to destabilize entire regions for decades (Bosco, 2005). The shockwaves of Rwanda’s genocide are still felt in the eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo nearly 20 years later, for example. Considerable resources are now devoted to the task of preventing genocide. In 2004 the United Nations established the Office of the Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide with the purpose to ‘raise awareness of the causes and dynamics of genocide, to alert relevant actors where there is a risk of genocide, and to advocate and mobilize for appropriate action’ (UN 2012). At the 2005 World Summit governments pledged that where states were ‘manifestly failing’ to protect their populations from ‘war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ the international community could step in a protect those populations itself (UN, 2012). The ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) project, designed to move the concept of state sovereignty away from an absolute right of non-intervention to a moral charge of shielding the welfare of domestic populations, is now embedded in international law (Evans 2008). Just this year, the United States government has stated that ‘preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States,’ and that ‘President Obama has made the prevention of atrocities a key focus of this Administration’s foreign policy’ (Auschwitz Institute, 2012). Numerous scholars and non-government organisations have similarly made preventing genocide their primary focus (Albright and Cohen, 2008; Genocide Watch, 2012).