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In early November 2013, Adama Dieng, the UN genocide adviser, briefed the Security Council on the Central African Republic’s (CAR) unraveling humanitarian crisis. “We are seeing armed groups killing people under the guise of their religion,” Dieng said, referring to a recent spike in reprisal killings between “self-defense groups” and loosely government-linked militias. The former, according to UN officials, are predominately Christian, and the latter–led, though led is too strong a term, by rebel alumnus Michel Djitodia–are Muslim. This tragic divide prompts a familiar vocabulary. The Rwandan ambassador to the UN, no stranger to genocide, observed, “I had the impression it is like in 1994 at home.”

If CAR’s conflict is a prototype of genocide, the UN’s comments are a typical response. We–those who concern themselves with mass violence–define genocide through impression, and impression only. An event looks like genocide–a slaughtered minority, a violent speech, unmitigated reprisals–and so it must be. But genocide does not describe mass violence; rather, genocide describes the identity of those who commit violence, and its meaning for those who bear its scourge. Genocide is real, as identity is real, but it is also invented–by its participants, by its victims, by its survivors, and, perhaps most relevantly, by us, its global bystanders.

As an idea, modernity is as uncertain as it is widespread. Modernity has come to mean a particular time, a particular space, and a particular way of thinking about the human ecosystem. It’s the most self-referential of our contemporary myths–our thinkers become moderns because they invent themselves as such, and not because their intellectual moment is unique in itself. In identity and in output, each player in the game of ideas grapples with the modern hand they’re dealt. Their modern ideologies, their buildings and streets, their organizations and societies–each facet creates modernity, and is created by it.

Where modernity creates, it also destroys. Modern ideologies strike humanity from their histories, left and right. In Marshall Berman’s words:

“[Modernity] is a terrible and tragic convergence, sealed with victims’ blood, undergirded with their bones, which come in the same forms and colors everywhere. The process of development that the creative spirits of the nineteenth century conceived as a great human adventure has become in our own era a life-and-death necessity for every nation and every social system in the world. As a result, development authorities everywhere have accumulated powers that are enormous, uncrontrolled and all too often lethal.”

Berman’s modern city is the highest form of creative destruction. The skyscraper, that towering fixture of urban growth, leaves a local neighborhood in its wake; the subway line, a scrappy artisan. “It was necessary,” suggests the modern, as a developer razes one village, and then the next. Modernity justifies its creation in retrospect–a weak justification, indeed. In modernity’s ecosystem, human progress exists for some, and perhaps for all, but always at another’s expense. An expropriated day-laborer will nourish a modern factory as the illicit market feeds its formal economy. Modernity’s lucrative underbelly sustains it, and navigates its unseen shadows.

We contest a mass atrocity’s modernity in its contemporary politics and in its memory. Germany’s “dark” democracy remains the gold standard–a murderous institution that invented itself as modern, and which perpetrated its modernity in the deadliest ways. Kenya and Rwanda, among others, have become Germany’s inglorious opposition, their events defined as much by the barbarism of mass murder as the simplicity of their organization. But we mistake a bureaucracy’s form for its politics. We associate technologies as a child builds blocks–the crematoria are complex in a way the machetes could never be. Of course, the architecture of the Holocaust is no less barbaric than Hutu Power’s roving militias, and its violence no more sophisticated than Kenya’s ethnic politics. These modern hallmarks are fictive, but only for a moment–a fleeting reality links the small political fissure between what we know, and what we remember.

In 1939, E.B. White visited the “world of tomorrow“–the World’s Fair, in Queens, New York. Our contemporary World’s Fair is an homage to forgotten innovation–in Men in Black, the fairgrounds are a hub for extraterrestrial transport; in Iron Man 2, Tony Stark heralds a superheroic future at a revived exhibition. For White, writing months before Poland’s collapse, the fairgrounds displayed a modernity at once terrible and sublime. As the essay closes, White describes an automaton, oddly aroused:

“Here was the Fair, all fairs, in pantomime; and here the strange mixed dream that made the Fair: the heroic man, bloodless and perfect and enormous, created in his own image, and in his hand (rubber, aseptic) the literal desire, the warm and living breast.”

The automaton’s control, like the urban planner’s, is both elusive and illusory. The modern creates their object on a terrifying scale, and expects it to do their bidding. The consequence of failure, as Berman writes, is “often lethal” for the act that gives the object meaning. The act evolves, but where-to remains uncertain. The Fair’s inventors create the automaton, an unfeeling entity, to mimic human sexuality–sexuality, as far as we can tell, has survived. Real estate developers create a new high-rise, a living space, to supplant residential homes–some live in better homes; others, in no homes at all.

A mass atrocity’s logic is much the same, though obviously in different–and more tragic–contexts. A modern organization–a state or otherwise–seeks control over its people–over how they go to work, over how they use the Internet, over how and when they dissent and revolt and rebel. The organization rarely achieves that control, even in the most totalitarian societies. When they lose control, the organization has two options for its momentary survival: continued creation, or expanded destruction. The latter is a mass atrocity, which preserves the organization it later destroys on a much greater scale.

The Stanley Foundation has released a new policy memo, titled, “Preventing Mass Atrocities: Resilient Societies, State Capacity, and Structural Reform.” I served as a rapporteur for the memo’s affiliated conference, and contributed to the memo’s various drafts. The memo is intended for an international policy audience, but we tried our best to make our conclusions as accessible as possible. The memo’s key conclusions are threefold, and will be familiar to this blog’s regular readers:

To achieve resilience, start at the margins: International actors should identify opportunities for common collaboration with local groups and build from there. By definition, the greatest vulnerabilities are the most difficult to address.
Preventive action is dynamic, not static: To adapt to the quick evolution of mass violence, international actors should integrate preventive action across varied sectors and throughout different stages of mass violence.
Anticipate unintended consequences: International actors should be aware that in some cases they will work with and alongside former perpetrators to build preventive resilience. To mitigate hazards, preventive action should define clear boundaries between positive incentives and unconditional support.

Futurism is, at best, a speculative affair. If it’s difficult to say “goodbye to all that,” in the perennial words of Robert Graves, it’s even harder to tell what follows its departure. For those who seek a better world–if not a kingdom of freedom, then perhaps a few villages–this future often seems elusive. Our nascent peace, so trumpeted as a consequence of our modern humanity’s “better angels,” is surely reversible. Illusions of control over our collective politics fade into weakness, creating systemic vacuums that shape uncertain cycles of violence. These cycles are hardly inevitable, and are often disrupted, but history’s moral arc is long, indeed.

But imagining our future is a necessary task, one which can explain our tragic past and, optimistically, improve a dismal present. In a recent post, Sean Langberg imagines the future of mass atrocity and, consequently, of mass atrocity prevention. As Jay Ulfelder observes on Twitter, “prevention requires foresight,” so that those who seek a better future might anticipate its probable roadblocks. Sean’s basic question–“What can we expect from future mass atrocities?”–is an important one, and a fundamental dilemma for a still-emerging human rights agenda.

It’s important to define what this question is, and what it isn’t. It isn’t an exercise in prediction, though predictive analysis is futurism’s closest corollary. When we predict something, we assess the probability that a specific event will occur: if “x” conditions, then “y” outcomes. Political scientists have devised robust tools of quantitative analysis to predict future events: coups, electoral victories, political instability, and, most relevantly, mass killing. Prediction assumes a basic theory of causality, by which certain factors become more influential than others. Sean’s futurism is different, but complementary. In describing the future of mass atrocity as a concept, we describe a mass atrocity as a complex system where the basic ecology of violence is in constant flux. A mass atrocity’s dynamism resists neat causal models, as global phenomena affect trends in local violence throughout time. A mass atrocity is not dynamic because all politics is complex, though it is, but because the social experience of mass human death iterates itself. It totally transforms how people interact with each other and with the organizations they form, again and again and again.

The dynamism of mass violence suggests that, to speculate about the future of mass violence, we must look to the evolution of the global system. By global system, I refer to a plural, simultaneous series of political relationships: local to international, national to regional, and so on. To isolate a specific level of analysis–the United Nations over the nation-state, the grassroots peacebuilding organization over the multinational peacekeeping force–is to restrict international politics to unhelpful ideological priors, which are scarcely relevant to the human experience of mass violence. How people associate to resist violence, how they subsist during total war–these questions, and not whether the resulting organizations are “local” or “regional,” shape the contours of a mass atrocity.

In a global system, which trends might inform the future of mass violence? Let’s start with the past. The historiography of mass atrocity is increasingly fractured, its divine truths impermanent. If historians of the Holocaust once cast its bureaucracy as technologically sophisticated, recent historians have pointed out the sheer intimacy of affiliated mass killing. Jan Gross’ Neighbors, and the Polish public’s ensuing firestorm, revealed that Jedwabne’s violence of July, 1941, looked much like the violence of 1492. The Rwandan genocide, of 1994, is much the same. News reports, the history of Rwanda’s present, displayed the mass atrocity as that barbarism of a lesser humanity. In fact, as later histories indicate, Rwandan hardliners established a robust bureaucracy of paramilitary violence–the Zero Network–that probably rivaled Nazi Germany’s in its sophistication, if not its technology. A mass atrocity’s timestamp reveals less as modernity’s illusions wither.

If a mass atrocity’s perch on history’s long arc tells us little, we might turn instead to the politics that comprise the ecology of mass violence. Elsewhere, I’ve divided these components into two: organization (how a conflict-affected society engages violence) and environment (how those outside the society engage). I attended a conference on mass atrocity prevention earlier this week, and several conference comments may explain the future of a mass atrocity’s organization. Multiple conference participants, from both the United Stated and elsewhere, portrayed the escalating “crackdown on civil society” as a barrier to their work in conflict-affected communities. Sudan’s ongoing repression, fueled by the central government’s austerity policies, is an inglorious example. Sudan’s worst mass violence occurs on its periphery, in Darfur and in the country’s border states, South Kordofan and Blue Nile. Civil society groups–in Khartoum and in Sudan’s provincial urban centers–often link peripheral communities to broader transit routes, a commercial and humanitarian lifeline. As Sudan’s simultaneous mass atrocities ebb at social cohesion, these fading lifelines make a future of collective resilience much more difficult to achieve.

Peacebuilding consensus sees the formal bodies of international governance–the United Nations, its regional corollaries, and disparate mechanisms of international criminal justice–as the future arbiters of mass atrocity prevention. If the bodies exist, this logic proceeds, they must be essential. There is some merit to these arguments, but these bodies’ baseline trends–such as the micro-politics of the UN Security Council’s permanent members–don’t change as much as the arguments assume. Per Samuel Moyn’s history of the United Nations, for example, these bodies were set up to preserve the status quo–positive outcomes occur in spite of the formal order, rather than because of it. In that vein, informal trends will likely drive future variations in a mass atrocity’s external environment. Nils Gilman’s “deviant globalization“–the growth of illicit economies in globalization’s shadow–may yet be important. If a repressed civil society provides a waning lifeline to resilient conflict communities, these informal networks fuel an atrocity’s perpetrators. These current phenomena are not historically unique–high-level Nazi officials gained a financial foothold in illicit Swiss banks–but likely occur on a broader scale than before.

These are two among many systemic phenomena that might shape the future of mass atrocity. What’m I missing?

Since the beginning of the U.S. government shutdown, progressive commentators have roundly condemned false comparisons with the Republican Party’s extremist fringe. These commentators shoulder far-right Congressional officials with the country’s budgetary stranglehold, debunking popular hand-wringing our “broken political system.” The problem is, they’re both right: the shutdown is the GOP’s fault, but liberalism allowed it to occur.

“Liberalism,” as an idea, exists in many forms: as a popular political identity, as an assortment of political organizations, and, here, as a historical idea. Two pillars shape the U.S. government’s historical approach to liberal politics, and they are largely continuous throughout the country’s 20^th century political history. The first is what James Scott referred to as the “high modernist” state: a central planning body responsible for national policy management, from local schools to federal monetary policy. As the U.S. government spent its first 150 years fighting—often literally—for its own authority, the trappings of U.S. high modernism are relatively recent innovations: the Social Security Administration (1935), the Department of Health and Human Services (1953), the Department of Education (1979). This “high modern” liberalism increasingly constitutes the U.S. political consensus. Congressional conservatives talk a big game about the glory of John Galt’s libertarianism, but to take their Ayn Rand fandom seriously overlooks their basic function as the conduits of the “high modern” state: thus, pork-barrel politics.

Liberalism’s second pillar is an abiding faith in incremental politics. The U.S. government’s liberal consensus rests on the slow, unsteady march towards political improvement, as in ongoing public debates around education reform. Liberals—that is, those who engage with U.S. governance, rather than outside of it—tinker with the state, and often supplement it, but they never supplant it. If, as Karl Marx wrote, our systems of governance “set out from real, active men,” the real, active politics of contemporary society are ubiquitous.

Incremental politics emerge because, with the high modernist state in place, revolution becomes unimaginable. The state has become America’s most basic engine of social exchange, in a way that it wasn’t in, say, 1873. Both progressives and conservatives have tapped into this basic truth of American politics: consider, for example, the Republican response to Elizabeth Warren’s “social contract” monologue during the 2012 election cycle. That is, popular disputes over the state’s social influence vary by scale (“limited government”), rather than existence. A century-and-a-half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed a similar phenomenon in his historical assessment of post-revolutionary France: even the most revolutionary futures bear striking similarities to the incremental past.

Cultural commentators on both the left and the right during the first half of the 20^th century—the high modernist state’s growth years—decried the “cult of experience” in liberal American politics: that, with enough knowledge of how communities thrive, planners might improve their basic livelihoods. Jane Addams’ settlement houses were once the controversial standard-bearers of incremental liberalism; now, Cass Sunstein’s “nudging” receives official sanction in the U.S. government’s top budgetary organizations. For Christopher Lasch, one of liberalism’s most prominent critics throughout the 1960s, the social-planning consensus overpromised, and underdelivered. “For the new radicals,” he wrote, “conflict itself, rather than injustice or inequality, was the evil to be eradicated. Accordingly, they proposed to reform society not through the agencies of organized coercion, the courts of law and the power of the police, but by means of social engineering…” Policies—institutional tweaks—would redeem the basic failures of American governance, and the politics—the institution’s basic structures—would follow.

Liberalism’s incremental politics have, since the early 20^th century, crafted a political system with undeniable dividends for American society, at least in the aggregate. Whatever the rising human costs of inequality, incremental improvements to the high modernist state are widespread: a stronger social safety net supports impoverished workers, and U.S. small-business entrepreneurs now receive extensive assistance from public bodies.

As in human biology, exposure precedes fragility. That the liberal consensus underemphasizes the mess of politics is now a common critique, and one which contemporary critics of education reform, in particular, highlight. But the shutdown, brought on by the catastrophic wrangling of a political fringe, returns the same critique to the fore. The liberal state shapes our lives in profound ways, both implicit and explicit; for many Americans, its disappearance is (rightly) unthinkable. And so political officials seek the improvement of this ever-present state, failing to notice that its tenuous incrementalism heralds its own decay.