This essay is adapted in part from a keynote speech delivered by Dr. Stanton on April 26, 2024 to a conference on “Teaching About Genocide” sponsored by the Educators Institute for Human Rights, the Alliance Against Genocide, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. It is published under a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license. 

With the death toll of World War II at 85 million killed, making it the deadliest conflict in human history, the victors founded the United Nations in 1945 to prevent future wars. To avert another Holocaust, the UN General Assembly passed the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948.

But the United Nations has failed to prevent war or genocide.

Since its founding, the UN has been crippled by the veto of the five permanent members (P5) of the Security Council. The colonial era had not ended by 1945, and the colonial powers, including the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China wanted to keep their empires. The most powerful nation, the United States, wanted to maintain its military and economic dominance. These five nations insisted on having vetoes in the Security Council, the only UN body with the power to authorize the use of military force. If even one of the P5 vetoes a decision, the UN cannot authorize military intervention anywhere in the world.

It is a fatal flaw in the UN Charter, which must be amended.

The Making of Uniting for Peace

In 1950, North Korea, with Soviet support, invaded South Korea. The USSR had made the mistake of walking out of the Security Council from January through July 1950 because the UN refused to recognize Communist China’s claim to China’s seat in the UN. During the USSR’s absence, the United States, United Kingdom, and France pushed through the creation of a UN force to intervene in Korea.

To get around Soviet vetoes once it returned to the Security Council and to provide a future alternative to that body, the United States sponsored General Assembly Resolution 377A, widely known as the “Uniting for Peace” resolution. It states that in cases where the Security Council, because of a lack of unanimity among the P5, fails to act as required to maintain international peace and security, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately and may issue appropriate recommendations to UN members for collective measures—including the use of armed force when necessary. It was adopted on November 3, 1950, by a vote of 52 to 5, with 2 abstentions. The resolution was designed to provide the UN with an alternative avenue for action when at least one P5 member uses its veto to obstruct the Security Council from carrying out its functions mandated by the UN Charter.

To facilitate prompt action by the General Assembly in the case of a deadlocked Security Council, the resolution created the mechanism of the emergency special session (ESS). Emergency special sessions have been convened under this procedure on eleven occasions, with the most recent in February 2022, to address Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sessions can be suspended and reconvened when needed. 

Although the United States originally sponsored the Uniting For Peace Resolution, it has become very reluctant to use it. When I was a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. State Department, State lawyers told me, “Oh, we don’t favor Uniting For Peace anymore. In the General Assembly, the U.S. has no veto.” 

Nonetheless, the United States again supported the use of Uniting For Peace after Russia invaded Ukraine because Moscow would have vetoed any UN action in the Security Council.

The critical point here is that the United States and other members of the P5 should use Uniting For Peace much more often to call for armed UN peacekeeping missions to stop genocides and prosecute their perpetrators. But there could be an even more powerful solution to the P5 veto: The Charter can be amended by calling a General Conference of the United Nations under Article 109(3) which requires only a majority vote of the UN General Assembly and a vote of any seven members of the UN Security Council to convene. A General Conference of the UN cannot be blocked by a P5 veto.

It appears that the P5 are afraid of a General Conference to amend the UN Charter because it would almost certainly call to abolish their veto. The P5 would face pressure to give up their stranglehold on the effectiveness of the UN.

Unable to Prevent Genocide?

In the meantime, the United Nations has failed to prevent war and genocide because it is built on the old nation-state system, which allows national governments to claim the right to commit crimes against their own citizens and justify genocide under claims of sovereignty.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine was supposed to overcome claims of national sovereignty. R2P posits that sovereignty doesn’t come down from rulers, but rather rises up from the people. Underlying R2P is the Enlightenment concept in Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson of “popular sovereignty”, which holds that when a nation is tyrannized by its own government, its citizens have the right to overthrow that government. Under R2P, the United Nations and relevant regional organizations have the right to intervene in nations that are murdering their own citizens. However, very few nations are willing to sacrifice the blood of their own military troops to carry out such R2P interventions.

R2P has not yet become enforceable international law. Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is an aspirational doctrine. It is still rejected by genocidal states. Moreover, many Asian and African nations, as well as Russia and China, see R2P as an attempt by Europe and the United States to reimpose colonial rule.

The lack of a United Nations Military Force also makes genocide prevention difficult.

A UN Military Force consisting of forces from UN member states is authorized by Articles 43 through 47 of the United Nations Charter. The Military Staff Committee, composed of Chiefs of Staff of P5 Security Council members, has never been operationalized. The main reason is that none of the P5 want a strong UN military force that could oppose their own armies.

Current UN peacekeeping missions are too weak to overpower national armies—they cannot stop genocides. It is time to create a UN Military Force like NATO’s, but without NATO’s requirement of unanimity to take military action. Genocide Watch has proposed an Optional Protocol to the Genocide Convention that would reaffirm the empowerment of regional organizations—acting in a consistent manner with the purposes and provisions of the Charter—to take collective action to maintain international peace and security under the UN Charter’s Chapter Eight. 

It sets forth procedures to determine whether genocide is underway or at significant risk of being committed, and it provides procedures for assembling armed forces to intervene to prevent or stop genocides.  

Further hindering efforts to prevent genocide is the fact that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has no police force to arrest people it charges. Courts cannot work without police forces to enforce their arrest warrants.

Today, there is no effective international police force to arrest people charged with crimes by the ICC or by international tribunals. National police forces usually refuse to arrest perpetrators of genocide because the police often serve under the same leaders charged by the ICC. Meanwhile, Interpol functions only to exchange intelligence between national police forces. It is not an international police force itself. The UN still lacks such a force to prevent genocide by arresting national leaders who are planning or perpetrating genocide.

The world needs an international police force. But injecting such police into a nation-state is still considered a violation of national sovereignty by many governments, especially genocidal regimes. R2P, as an emerging international norm, may be invoked in answer to such arguments.  

But how many nations are willing to send their army or police into other countries to face heavily armed national military forces determined to keep them out? The answer can be seen in the difficulty the UN has in recruiting troops for its peacekeeping operations, especially from countries with powerful militaries like the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China. If the UN can’t muster the forces, other means must be found.

One way to create an International Police Force would be to pass an Optional Protocol to the Treaty of the International Criminal Court to authorize one. It would have authority only to execute arrest warrants for persons charged by the ICC with genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression.  But even such a police force would face resistance from genocidal states. The fundamental problem is the persistent paradigm of national sovereignty.

Genocide Watch’s proposed Optional Protocol to the Genocide Convention would reaffirm the authority of the UN General Assembly to recommend the use of force when the UN Security Council is paralyzed by a P5 veto. This authority already exists under the Uniting for Peace Resolution of 1950. 

Rethinking the Law of Genocide

As a lawyer trained by Myres McDougal and Michael Reisman at Yale Law School, I was taught that law and policy are not two separate realms: that law is concretized policy, and law should be evaluated as policy. I am also a cultural anthropologist, trained by Victor Turner, Marshall Sahlins, and Leo Kuper. They trained me to look beneath the surface for the deeper structures and schisms that underlie societies and conflicts.

An anthropological analysis of lawyers in the international sphere may help us understand why the Genocide Convention has thus far failed to prevent genocide. Sadly, the Convention was born toothless, and lawyers have kept it from ever outgrowing its baby teeth.

The training of lawyers creates a backward-looking, adjudication-oriented view of genocide. At a conference at Cardozo Law School in 2011, a lawyer colleague put it this way, “The convention was primarily meant to adjudicate an individual’s criminal responsibility”. Lawyers in the U.S. State Department and U.K. Foreign Office even say they cannot use the term genocide until a court does.

One purpose of the Convention is certainly to punish genocidists. But if that is all it is, then we have forgotten the very name of the Convention: the “International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”. The Convention was meant to be forward-looking and preventive, not just a law for punishment.

The Precautionary Principle

In 2007, with my epidemiologist colleague, Dr. Elihu Richter, we submitted a proposal to the Albright-Cohen Commission convened to recommend ways to strengthen the U.S. response to preventing genocide. The Commission recommended establishing the U.S. Atrocities Prevention Board. We told the Commission that The Precautionary Principle should be applied by the Board when risks of genocide appear.

The Precautionary Principle states that when there is uncertainty concerning the possibility of the occurrence of a major catastrophic event, the costs of inaction far outweigh those of anticipatory preventive action. The Precautionary Principle shifts the burden of proof from those suspecting a catastrophic risk to those denying it. In everyday terms, the Precautionary Principle states that it is better to be safe than sorry.

We were ignored. The default policy of diplomats and world leaders when there are warning signs of genocide remains to do nothing and wait until the genocide is underway. Even then, because the cost will be so high: do nothing.

We know the political risk factors for genocide. Statistical studies by Barbara Harff have outlined them as: ongoing civil or international war; past genocide that has gone unpunished and is still denied; rule by an ethnically exclusive elite; official exclusionary ideology; autocracy or totalitarianism; closure of relations with the outside world; massive human rights violations such as torture and extrajudicial killings.

The anti-genocide movement should work against war and for punishment of perpetrators. We should press for broadly-based democratic governments. We should oppose ideologies of racial or class superiority. We should favour free trade and free speech. We should strongly oppose violations of fundamental human rights by any regime. Nevertheless, these factors cannot tell us when genocide is likely to happen, and therefore are of limited use in prevention.

That is why I developed a model of the genocidal process, “The Ten Stages of Genocide.”  I now regret choosing the word “stages” because it implies linearity in the model. In the first paragraph of the model, I stated that “the process is not linear. Stages may occur simultaneously”.

I should have just called the “stages” processes. They are what structural anthropologists call a transformational structure—a system of transformations. The Ten Stages of Genocide provides the outline of a transformational grammar of genocidal processes. I owe these concepts of structure to Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky.

Genocide is a process that develops in ten stages that are predictable, but not inexorable. At each stage, preventive measures can stop genocide. The process is not linear; many stages operate simultaneously. It is a logical model for thinking about the genocidal process and what we can do to prevent or stop it.

The model helps analysts organize the precursors of genocide so that strategies can be prescribed to stop each process that may lead to genocide. It is like organizing the processes that lead to diabetes so that methods can be prescribed to reduce each process; weight loss, reduction of sugar in the diet, medications that remove sugar from the body, and other methods may be prescribed to hold off the disease.

The Ten Stages of Genocide are Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization, Organization, Polarization, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination, and Denial. A fuller description of the Ten Stages can be found on the Genocide Watch website.

The original memo I wrote in 1996 was intended to educate State Department officers about the genocidal process and how to stop it. I knew it had to fit on one page, back and front, or it would not be read. Little did I know that it would become a paradigmatic model used by teachers and policymakers around the world. 

Overcoming Ethnocentrism, Racism, Nationalism, and Religious Intolerance

Genocide is committed by people who have lost sight of our common humanity. Though we are born into thousands of ethnic groups that speak thousands of languages and belong to hundreds of nations and have scores of religions, all humans belong to one family. Some think there are many races, but there is really only one race: the human race.

Genocide is committed when we become ethnocentric, racist, nationalistic, or religiously intolerant. Genocide is idolatry. We worship our ethnic group, race, nation, or religion instead of God. We build golden altars and sacrifice human beings upon them. Instead of blessing all humans as God’s creations, we bathe our weapons with their blood. 

Several steps must be taken to overcome these centrifugal forces that divide human beings and lead to wars and genocides. 

• We must build educational systems that create anti-genocidal cultures.  

Genocide requires popular participation; 200,000 people participated in the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Churches in Rwanda could have played a powerful role in creating a culture resistant to genocide because many Hutus and Tutsis are Roman Catholics and attended the same churches, but the church was as ethnically divided as the rest of Rwandan society. Some clergy even participated in the killings. 

Today in Rwanda, churches are finally fulfilling the role they should play by fostering forgiveness and reconciliation.

In rethinking genocide prevention, we should pay special attention to the “bottom-up” dimension of genocide. How can anti-genocidal cultures be built? Religion has far too often been a cause of genocide. But what if every major religious establishment regularly affirmed the core principle in all religions: that all human beings belong to one race—the human race? We need to spark the efforts of people at the grassroots in schools, universities, seminaries, churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples all over the world.

What if the Roman Catholic Church made one of its core doctrines the unity of the human race and the prevention of genocide? We have already talked to Pope Francis about this proposal. He has embraced the idea.

• Many more nations must elect women as their leaders.

To end genocide and war, women must be empowered. Women bring a different dimension to conflicts and conflict resolution processes compared to those dominated by men. Women have played a consistently positive role in fostering dialogue, reaching peace agreements, and addressing root causes of conflict.

To put the difference between men’s and women’s approaches to conflict perhaps too simply:

When men have conflicts, they fight.

When women have conflicts, they talk.

Talking is a lot better way to resolve conflicts than fighting.

An example of this difference can be found in the efforts of women to bring an end to the deadly divisions of Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. After men had tried to negotiate peace for a hundred years, women stepped in and became a powerful force to stop the sectarian killing.

Another example is the extraordinary story of how Leemah Gbowee and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf led a women’s non-violent resistance movement that forced the murderous dictator Charles Taylor out of office and brought democracy back to Liberia.

In an era of nuclear weapons that could destroy life on earth, and a century when more people are killed by their own governments than from all wars combined, it is time to campaign for a new world order with many more societies and political systems led by women.

3. We must create the political will to prevent genocide.

The UN, EU, and U.S. failure in the Rwandan Genocide, in Bosnia, and in Darfur was not the absence of early warning of the coming catastrophes. It was the absence of political will to prepare for and prevent them.

Even when UN Peacekeeping Missions have been deployed, they are not given strong mandates to protect civilians by fighting and defeating genocidal armies. Yasushi Akashi, the pacifist head of the United Nations Protection Force in former Yugoslavia (UNPROFOR), refused to authorize the bombing of Bosnian Serb sniper nests across the river from Sarajevo. Akashi was finally replaced after the Srebrenica genocide. NATO bombed Belgrade and forced Milošević to make peace at Dayton.

In Rwanda, there were 2500 UNAMIR troops on the ground when the genocide began. Rather than reinforce them as General Roméo Dallaire requested, the United States, United Kingdom, and France led the UN Security Council to order withdrawal of all but 400 UNAMIR troops. Even the 400 Ghanaian troops who elected to stay against orders saved hundreds of lives. 

Meanwhile, two thousand French and Belgian troops were able to airlift all French and Belgians out of Rwanda, along with their pets. Not a single Rwandan was allowed to board the planes. The U.S. embassy drove out to Burundi protected by UNAMIR peacekeepers and Marine guards. 

Political will is not a mystery. It is not mystical mumbo-jumbo that is impossible to analyze and understand. Anyone who witnessed the triumph of the political campaigns of President Barack Obama should see that political will can be built from the ground up.

It is time that we hold our leaders to account. We must no longer accept their excuses. President Clinton’s “we did not know” speech in Kigali after the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda was a lie—of course he knew. I had top secret codeword clearance in the State Department in 1994 and read the same cables that were used to brief Clinton. A cable to the State Department and National Security Council from the Department of Defense on the first day of the genocide on April 7, 1994 called the mass killings “genocide”. Our Deputy Chief of Mission in Kigali, Joyce Leader, has told me she called the massacres “genocide” in her daily phone calls to the State Department from the first day, April 7 onward.

But the U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda, David Rawson, who had grown up a missionary’s son in Burundi, didn’t know what genocide is. Neither did the State Department Office of the Legal Advisor. They thought the killings were part of a civil war, rather than a genocide. They didn’t understand that most genocides occur during civil or international wars; wars and genocides are not mutually exclusive, they usually go together.

Secretly, the United States had ships filled with thousands of U.S. Marines right off the coast of East Africa when the genocide began. But President Clinton never authorized their deployment to Rwanda. 

4. Leaders of genocides must be arrested or killed. 

I have always been perplexed by the unwillingness of the world’s leaders to send in heavily armed commandos to arrest the leaders of genocides and take them for trial to the Hague. The ICC should require preliminary hearings and arrest warrants. But currently there are no international police to arrest Omar al Bashir and General Hemedti who led or are leading genocides that murder thousands of people. 

Assassinations of national leaders who are ordering or directing genocides would be a direct violation of the principle of national sovereignty that accords immunity to heads of state. It has been a doctrine in the law of nations since Grotius. But it is not recognized by the Genocide Convention. No one is granted immunity for the commission of genocide. 

The International Criminal Court has the legal authority to charge heads of state and their accomplices with genocide. It is time for the ICC to be given a police force to carry out its arrest warrants. If the ICC police are violently resisted, they should be explicitly authorized to use force to take suspects into custody.

Indeed, why is it out of the question to send in commandos to kill genocidal leaders if they resist court orders and can’t be arrested? Dietrich Bonhoeffer was part of the plot to kill Hitler. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded that Bonhoeffer was morally right.

Using any moral calculus, Utilitarian, Rule Utilitarian, Kantian, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, or Hindu, it should be justifiable to kill one leader who is committing genocide and causing the deaths of thousands of people.

5. It is time to build an international anti-genocide movement on the scale of the anti-slavery movement. We must build the political will for international intervention when genocide is imminent.

When I founded Genocide Watch in 1999, there was not a single organization in the world entirely devoted to the prevention of genocide. At the same time, we founded the Alliance Against Genocide to create the coalition necessary to mobilize a mass movement. 

Today, there are hundreds of anti-genocide organizations. The Alliance Against Genocide has 120 member organizations in 31 countries with thousands of employees. There are many other anti-genocide organizations that are not yet members of the Alliance. We share the same vision. It is especially important to build anti-genocide organizations in countries at risk of genocide. 

The more I have worked against genocide, the more I have become convinced that genocide must be defeated locally. It can be prevented only by teaching people the empathy for their neighbors that will make them “upstanders” who will oppose the dehumanization necessary for genocide. 

Empathy is the ability to place oneself in the shoes of another. It is the measure of a person’s moral capacity.  Empathy is the expression of Satyagraha, that great truth force that Gandhi rediscovered, and that was also taught by the Buddha, Amos, Jesus, Muhammed, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Empathy is expressed in both justice and love. It has revolutionary power because justice and love flow from the same Force: the divine Force that made every star and created every human being.