Paths Not Traveled: Genocide Prevention, the Global Grassroots, and the Power of Dialogism

Abstract

Genocide prevention has been a field located in the Global North but preoccupied with the Global South. It is an elite field that is dominated by Western technical experts, many of whom have close ties to Western governments, and that is organized along vertical hierarchies. It works largely with states and militaries, and focuses a majority of its attention on military intervention into ongoing conflict as well as legal accountability after genocide has been committed. These priorities have had a dramatic impact on how genocide is defined and identified, preferencing the mass killing element of the crime and “reducing genocide to law,” as the legal scholar Payam Akhavan aptly put it in his 2012 book of that title. Although grassroots outreach is sometimes advocated, it is usually understood in terms of pressure politics and lobbying at the center of global power rather than as the empowerment of ordinary people worldwide as transformative and preventative agents in and of themselves. This article is both a call for critical self-examination of the field of genocide studies and a surfacing of paths not taken in the practice of genocide prevention.