Heinrich Böll Foundation and GPPi analyze the Obama administration’s efforts on mass atrocity prevention

On 12 July 2013, the Heinrich Böll Foundation and GPPi published an analysis of US foreign policy to prevent mass atrocities during the first Obama administration. The study was commissioned by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and written by Philipp Rotmann, Sarah Brockmeier and Gerrit Kurtz, all with GPPi. 

In August 2011, President Obama declared that the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities was ​“a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.” His administration claims to be devoting far greater attention to this issue than its predecessors, notably by establishing at the White House an Atrocities Prevention Board, which began meeting in April 2012. In Germany, despite a growing debate on implementing the ​“responsibility to protect,” this focus on mass atrocity prevention in Obama’s foreign policy has received scant attention. 

In its first part, the study provides an analysis of White House efforts in 2009 – 2012 to improve the administration’s ability to prevent mass atrocities. These efforts focused mainly on prevention and building awareness within the US government. 

A second part of the study examines to what extent the rhetoric and institutional innovations in Washington were relevant for specific situations of looming or ongoing mass atrocities. Examples from Sri Lanka, Sudan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, DR Congo, Libya, Syria and the efforts against the Lord’s Resistance Army result in a mixed picture. For all these cases, the authors found evidence of priority attention on the part of President Obama. The most consequential case was Libya, where the imminent risk of mass atrocities against civilians in Benghazi played a critical role in swaying Obama toward military intervention. At the same time, few cases demonstrate a step change in comparison to previous US governments. 

Nonetheless, the authors conclude that US expectations of German contributions to mass atrocity prevention are likely to increase. Drawing on their analysis of the US efforts to date, they provide recommendations for German policymakers on how to improve German, European and multilateral capacity to prevent genocide and other mass atrocities. 

Click here to read the full study (in German) or here to read a summary in English.