Category: blog

I have a couple of posts on other web platforms that blog readers may find interesting. For regular readers, the posts won’t be new, but they’re a valuable mechanism for widening the conversation on broadening, strengthening, and smartening international human rights advocacy:

• As I’ve discussed in a prior post, an emerging coalition of human rights advocates have called for the implementation of a non-consensual, cross-border aid delivery operation in South Kordofan and Blue Nile. The New York Times‘ “Room for Debate” blog hosted a discussion on conflict resolution and humanitarian relief in Sudan. I had the privilege of participating in the online forum, which included perspectives from John Prendergast, Andrew Natsios, and representatives from Girifna and Oxfam. In my piece, I identify the strategic and moral hazards of military intervention in Sudan’s border regions, contextualize the operation within Sudan’s internal political instability, and propose a set of non-coercive policy alternatives, focusing on leveraging external, non-Western pressure, and facilitating forceful diplomacy with moderate actors in the NCP administration. For additional, complementary perspectives on Sudan human rights policy, see the forum contributions from Georgetown’s Andrew Natsios, Oxfam’s El Fateh Osman, and Girifna’s Dalia Haj Omar.
• Over at the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (which my roommates edit), I posted a piece on the role of the global South in the “responsibility to protect” doctrine’s evolution. I’ve harped on the global South’s increasingly important R2P contributions, but this piece’s publication is particularly timely: the UN General Assembly has initiated informal dialogues on Brazil’s “responsibility while protecting” principle, and the RwP concept will figure prominently over the next few months in a variety of South-South, regional, and bilateral diplomatic fora. In my piece, I clarify South-South relationships’ potential contributions to R2P’s operationalization, particularly as pertains to the state capacity-building mandates of the doctrine’s first two pillars. Also, it’s worth noting: a nascent body of literature on R2P in the global South has emerged over the past six months. Over the next couple of days, I’m going to take a look at this literature, its normative implications for Western human rights advocacy, writ large, and the possibilities for progress on doctrinal operationalization. Watch this blog, as they say.

The institutionalization of human rights policy throughout the past two decades has led to the sweeping operationalization of liberal norms, through human rights policy mechanisms, new legal bodies, and burgeoning non-governmental organizations. The causal impact of Steven Pinker’s “humanitarian revolution” may be slightly overstated, but the heightened prioritization of human rights in various local, national, regional, and international political spheres is apparent. The political consolidated of human rights advocacy has allowed a second normative stage to emerge: the Critical Backlash. Political resistance was one thing, but the evolution of human rights advocacy’s moral critique is quite another. As any active tweeter will tell you, “moral hazard” and “unintended consequences” have become essential characteristics of human rights discourse. The basic concept: rather than maintaining a siloed, moral distance from policy, human rights operate within a political sphere; accordingly, the implementation of rights has unanticipated repercussions and moral ambiguities. Because they occur within an amoral context, human rights policies can lead to immoral consequences, furthering the disenfranchisement and dislocation they intended to address.

The notion of public policy’s nth-order effects is not new. As a recent NYT analysis notes, “moral hazard” emerged as an “obscure insurance term,” rooted in microeconomic principles. In social-service parlance, the hazard is often discussed as self-reliance’s counterpart, underscored by the ethically corrosive implications of welfare, communitarian support, and fiscal bailout. In an international human rights context, the norm’s critics perceive moral hazards within human rights and humanitarian interventions, due to the muddled politics of policy implementation. See, for example, Sarah Lischer’s classic, controversial study on the role of humanitarian assistance in fueling civil conflict (ungated), or Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian’s more recent, comprehensive analysis of food aid and conflict onset (ungated). Due to their reliance on politics, human rights and humanitarian initiatives often fall subject to exploitation and manipulation by rights-restricting conflict actors.

“Unintended consequences” pose a similar challenge to moral policy implementation. For kinetic operations, including covert action, no-fly zones, and ground deployments, the unintended consequences are readily apparent: collateral civilian deaths, infrastructural damage, restricted aid routes, and the escalation of targeted violence against civilian populations. As policy interventions become less coercive, the unintended consequences become less apparent and, in most circumstances, less severe: economic and social dislocation, lagging human development, and public health challenges (see, for example, the oft-cited case of mineral extraction and violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). In theory, advocates perceive human rights policy as internally and externally consistent–that is, with itself, as well as related policy frameworks, including development, public health, and peacebuilding. Frequently, however, the consequences of amoral politics undermines moral consistency, pitching human rights policy into an ambiguous sphere.

Public policy institutions, including both domestic and foreign bodies, have recognized the presence of moral hazards and unintended consequences within  the policy implementation process, and have sought to mitigate its occurrence. In the early 1960s, the Johnson administration established the Research, Programming, Planning, and Evaluation division of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the administration’s clearing house for “war on poverty” policy. By the end of the 1980s, national agencies and international bodies initiated social and environmental impact assessment programs, seeking to apply social-scientific methodologies to the understanding of political institutions, economic and social interactions, and ecological phenomena. (See McKinsey Social Sector Office for a concise timeline.)

From a public policy perspective, impact evaluation serves two roles: first, evaluative processes provide an opportunity to improve organizational inefficiencies, redundancies, and resource gaps; second, evaluation serves a moral function, allowing organizations to conduct scalable initiatives more responsibly, with an eye towards constituent, rather than organizational needs. As impact evaluation became a prominent component of international public policymaking, the non-governmental, international development community followed suit, applying medical randomization practices to existing impact evaluation frameworks. Randomized controlled trials, as they’re called, test the micro-level implementation of a development project’s “theory of change.” Development impact evaluations, according to Chris Blattman, seek to challenge basic assumptions about institutional behavior, organizational cultures, and, on a fundamental level, human nature. Innovations for Poverty Action, a development implementation, research, and evaluation organization, has championed the RCT approach, using the framework to assess the impact of peace education in Liberia, reconciliation projects in Sierra Leone, and youth demobilization and reintegration campaigns in Uganda. Most recently, the peacebuilding community–including donors bodies, like the OECD-DAC, and non-governmental organizations, like the U.S. Institute of Peace–has matured slowly towards an evaluative model. While research limitations, a vicious normative cycle, and accountability restraints continue to limit effective peacebuilding evaluation, recent USIP-guided gatherings suggest an emerging enthusiasm for the evaluative process.

Despite their relative youthfulness, human rights advocacy organizations have a great deal to learn from selective cultures of self-criticism within the public policy, development, and peacebuilding communities. As I’ve written before, cognitive biases, closed-feedback loops, and simplified narratives within human rights organizations disincentive due consideration of human rights policies’ unintended consequences and moral hazards. Policy interventions are perceived through a problematic “act first, ask later” lens; from a moral perspective, nth-order implications and political side-effects receive much less attention from organizational leadership than the burden of urgent reaction. Social impact evaluation would encompass sustained, repeated reflections on organizational theories of change–not just domestically, but within conflict zones, as well. As a formalized, institutionalized mechanism for self-criticism, communicative transparency, and responsible leadership, evaluative procedures would create more credible opportunities for responsible analyses of the long-term moral and political characteristics of rights-based initiatives.

What would a human rights impact assessment look like? McKinsey’s “Learning Driven Assessment” concept provides an important first-principles framework for assessments: ensure local, constituent-based transparency; allow constant, unfettered interaction between evaluative processes and organizational strategy; and, lastly, utilize the evaluative process to foster a learning, self-critical culture within the human rights organization. An effective evaluative process would conduct on-the-ground, systematic surveys among affected communities, allowing international advocates to move beyond politically-motivated diaspora networks as vessels for human rights evaluations. Evaluations would function as a key component of future human rights policy conversations, allowing advocacy-oriented policy analysts to consider more nuanced, fine-tuned, and less hazardous mechanisms for policy intervention. Evaluations would be conducted by third-party consultants, conceivably unaffiliated with the cognitive biases, ideological orientations, and organizational motivations of internal advocates. Darfurian Voices, a multi-organization, multi-sector survey of Darfurian perspectives on conflict resolution and human rights in Sudan, functions as a valuable model, but its organizational-level impact remains unclear.

An evaluative framework is not without its challenges, of course. As Bec Hamilton conveys in her study of the Darfur advocacy movement, human rights advocates were effective at mobilizing attention towards Darfur, but their results stopped short of comprehensive conflict resolution. Amidst the myriad of political motivations for government action, it’s difficult to differentiate between the circumstances where advocates tip the scale, and those in which advocates merely support a predetermined initiative. Additionally, there’s the financial element: in an international development context, RCTs require hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement, due to the logistical, human, and organizational burdens of field research. In a human rights context, effect evaluation would likely require coordination with on-the-ground actors, or, ideally, the deployment of a field research team to the affected area. Between the fragile circumstances, the communication challenges, and the development of local implementation networks, evaluative projects would require a significant investment. However, advocacy organizations could work with the public sector to ensure the effective, well-resourced, and successful fulfillment of evaluative pilot projects.

Related Reading: Last September, Justice in Conflict’s Patrick Wegner offered a compelling case for the creation of a “Department of Impact Assessment” at the International Criminal Court, which would evaluate the political and moral repercussions of international criminal justice interventions.

In his latest column, Nick Kristof describes the civilian protection crisis in the Sudanese border state of South Kordofan, which has been immersed in conflict since the failure of the mismanaged, illegitimate popular consultation process last spring. With hundreds of deaths and tens of thousands displaced, South Kordofan’s civilians have sustained the brunt of the conflict’s impact. Perceiving thematic similarities between Khartoum’s South Kordofan counterinsurgency campaign and the Darfur conflict, Kristof uses the Darfur example to package and contextualize the Sudan/SPLM-N violence:

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.

This is the second post in a series on the lexicon of intervention’s slippery slope. The series is intended to educate human rights advocates about the opportunities, costs, and opportunity costs of coercive responses to mass atrocities.

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.

This is the second post in a series on the lexicon of intervention’s slippery slope. The series is intended to educate human rights advocates about the opportunities, costs, and opportunity costs of coercive responses to mass atrocities.

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.