Our failed response to genocide: Why states and citizens don’t do more to prevent mass atrocities

By Eyal Mayroz

Editors note: This article was originally published on ABC Religion & Ethics.

A few years ago, I attended a meeting on mass atrocity prevention at the United Nations. The agendas for such consultations tend to reflect the priorities of participating governments. This time my group, the Genocide Prevention Advisory Network, was asked to pay particular attention to the threats of radical Islam. It was shortly after the November 2015 Islamic State attacks in Paris, and with 130 fatalities and hundreds injured, the request came as no surprise. Still, the departure from the familiar public indifference and weak official responses to, or even complicity in, larger-scale atrocities was quite jarring. At the meeting, you could imagine millions of eyes of atrocity victims—Syrians, Sudanese, Yemenites, Congolese, Rwandans, and others—looking on in bewilderment. Why was a world that had left them to die, so troubled by a few more bodies?

Over the years, we have learned a few things about the incentives and disincentives for states to respond forcefully to mass atrocities. History has shown that unless governments identified significant security, economic, or other political benefits to action, the combined weight of recurring and situation-specific challenges was likely to dilute, or even preclude, meaningful measures.

But if this had been the case, then why have we, the citizens of these states, allowed and continue to permit our elected officials to ignore the cries of those massacred? Put differently, if our governments had chosen inaction, or failed to act, then either: we were oblivious to the events; we were led to believe that our politicians were free of fault; or, worst-case scenario, we chose to close our eyes when our governments took up the role of bystanders to mass atrocities in our name.

Regardless of which of these scenarios best matches the historical record, the value of learning more about this opinion-policy relationship is clear. If wilful ignorance, public apathy, and/or informed silent consent to inaction share partial responsibility for failures to prevent atrocities, then, uncovering these practices might help to create pressure for greater accountability on both citizens and policymakers.

Domestic processes of decision making on US responses and non-responses to genocide and other mass atrocities are at the centre of my recent book, Reluctant Interveners: America’s Failed Responses to Genocide from Bosnia to Darfur. While the focus of the book is on America’s institutions and public, many of its insights can be applied to relationships between citizenries, media outlets, and policymakers elsewhere in the world—including in Australia.

Why don’t we do more?

Protesting deliberate state inaction or ineffective government policies requires sustained efforts and commitment, which most citizens are reluctant to invest—particularly when not knowing what to do, or how likely their efforts are to make a difference. In the United States, other inhibitors to active popular dissent to bystander policies have included: flawed media coverage and compassion fatigue; lack of leadership to galvanise a political opposition; reluctance to bear the risks and costs of full-scale military interventions for humanitarian objectives; official management of the public by framing information in line with preferred policies; and low identification with and thus empathy for the suffering of distant “others”.

I became interested in the role of identification during a 2010 visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I began my self-guided tour in the Darfur display, which was empty of visitors. A quiet day at the museum, I speculated, but continuing to the Holocaust exhibition I found it jam-packed. A seasoned guide of African American descent helped shed light on the difference between the two exhibitions. Americans, he told me, including African Americans, find it easier to identify with European Jews of the 1940s than with the Darfuris of 2004. The Jews, even in those days, had dressed more similarly to Americans nowadays, lived in houses more like American houses, and spent their time doing things more akin to Americans.

Important insights about the causes and effects of identification and empathy have been offered by studies of the motives behind personal donations to victims of both natural and human-caused disasters. Predictably, identification featured high in the decisions to give to charity, its strength influenced by such factors as the number of victims, levels of physical and psychological proximity between donors and victims, and in-group/outgroup relationships. Other decision factors included: knowledge of the event and familiarity with its location; mutual influences of social groups; views concerning international responsibility; and perceptions about victims’ commitments to improving their situation.

Further insights were gained from studying differences in donors’ attitudes between natural disasters and human-caused atrocities. The persistent preference to support those who were victims of former over the latter reflected assumptions made by donors about the blameworthiness of victims. That is, in contrast with the “perfectly blameless” image of natural disaster victims, the complexities inherent to violent conflicts raised questions, particularly among uninformed donors, about possible culpability of the victims in the violence. Significant also may have been the sense that, while donations directly respond to the needs of natural disaster victims, they cannot address the underlying causes of mass violence in any significant way.

Important research by Paul Slovic and others suggests that high numbers of casualties could capture the attention of governments and the media, but may have a numbing effect on the public. In experiments conducted, ordinary citizens showed greater willingness to make charitable donations to one distant victim than to two, and to two victims over four. By the time the number of victims reaches thousands or more, their plight becomes little more than a statistic. The strongest empathy generated by the human mind is for a single person and so, the worse the tragedy, the less personalised the media reporting is likely to be, and the lower the identification generated. This inverse gap has proven difficult to close.

What can we do?

Preventive measures constitute, without doubt, the most beneficial responses to atrocities. If and when effective, they can eliminate the need for more costly or risky interventionist actions. Despite this clear logic, difficulties in attracting media, public, and policymakers’ attention to threatened but not yet occurring situations of violence too often result in insufficient political will to invest meaningfully in prevention. Prior to the breakout of violence, the media’s interest in the risks tends to be low, at best, and public empathy hardly existent.

Those of us wishing to harness the sway of the public should focus our efforts on better education, better access to reliable information, and improved quality of media coverage. Another potential avenue to explore is of the correlation between neglected atrocities overseas and salient challenges at home. During the 1980s, the anti-Apartheid movement had finally succeeded in making inroads into the priorities of the American political establishment by linking their overseas campaign to a high-visibility domestic debate over racial inequality in the United States.

Arguably, better understanding these days of the links between neglected violent conflicts at a distance and serious problems at home, focused currently on refugees and international terrorism, may bring us—with back-wind from anxious publics—a step closer to recalibrating our realpolitik cost-benefit calculations.

Another area where the public could have greater influence on policies relates to the nature and sources of the national interest. Historically, even though concerns for “faraway others” were never explicitly excluded from domestic public deliberations of US foreign policy, they were hardly factored in the calculus of administrations—Republicans and Democrats alike. Defending these practices, Hans Morgenthau wrote back in 1945 that, since elected officials were obliged to look after the interests of their constituents, it would have been morally wrong of them to take risks or bear costs that could not be justified based on these interests. And since cosmopolitan values were regarded generally as incompatible with dominant parochial conceptions of the US national interest, they were seen to be much less attractive.

Challenging such notions, political theorist Joseph Nye argued in 1999 that values in democratic societies may be integrated into the national interest of the state if considered important enough by the citizenry. According to Nye, if the public is informed of the costs involved in indulging certain values, and is still willing to incur them, then it has the legitimacy to affect such decisions. A democratic definition of the national interest, he noted, should not distinguish between moral-based and interest-based foreign policy, since moral values are little more than intangible interests.

Crimes of commission and failures of omission

Just days before Christmas, outgoing US president Donald Trump pardoned four former private security contractors convicted over a 2007 massacre in Baghdad that left more than a dozen Iraqi civilians dead and many wounded. Outrage over the pardons has since been shared across the US and international media, the United Nations, Iraq’s government, and, of course, the victims’ families. In contrast to these pardons, the Australian media and public have been following a divergent story of suspected war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan and the apparent commitment by the ADF to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.

Both cases relate to the same relationships between humanitarian imperatives, international legal obligations, operational challenges, and executive decisions over the protection of vulnerable populations in faraway countries. Armed interveners, humanitarian and not, could face sometimes split-second decisions over when and how to act. These potentially intense moral challenges tend to be lost on the media and the public except when critical decisions turn disastrous, provided that the incidents do not get hushed. However, the risks involved in any use of force, even for good purposes, must be made clear and considered by all who partake in discussions over troop deployments, including the public.

As is most often the case, the well-warranted uproar over the pardons in the United States and the important war crimes debate here in Australia would soon fade away from our screens, newspapers, and hence from our minds and hearts. The same will happen to stories about distant mass suffering which, for a brief moment, may attract our attention before turning invisible again. Still, these dynamics, common as they are, should not be taken for granted. Those of us lucky enough to live in countries with stronger human rights protections arguably share a moral obligation to help the less fortunate, even at certain costs. This responsibility applies to anyone in a position to influence responses to mass atrocities: from high level policymakers to ordinary citizens. Let’s strengthen our efforts to do so.

Eyal Mayroz is Senior Lecturer and Postgraduate Research Coordinator in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. His book Reluctant Interveners: America’s Failed Responses to Genocide from Bosnia to Darfur was named one of Choice magazine’s outstanding academic titles of 2020.