Despite the spread and institutionalization of international atrocity prevention over the past 30 years, our field is in crisis. The continued violence in Haiti, Iran, Lebanon, Myanmar, Palestine, Sudan, and Ukraine underscores only the most recent failures of the international community to protect civilians. The U.N. Security Council is dysfunctional, the U.N. system is ineffective and in a financial tailspin, and Russia, China, and the United States show little interest in international law or norms. As prevention practitioners navigate this complex crisis, we must consider how a reconstituted future global prevention system should look. There are many possible approaches, but one element involves rethinking the centrality of the United States.
Atrocity prevention concerns the spectrum of activities to forecast, prevent, mitigate, stop, and punish grave and large-scale human rights violations; all are oriented toward reducing the likelihood of further atrocities in the future. The global prevention architecture consists of overlapping international, national, and subnational legal systems, political mechanisms, and strategies adopted by civil society organizations, states, and intergovernmental organizations. It rests on a set of universal norms of human rights, international law, and multilateralism. Global South states and “middle-powers” have made significant contributions to this work, though until recently global prevention was implicitly – if selectively – backstopped by financial, logistical, and, at times, military support from Western Europe, the United States, and a few other countries.
The United States occupied a central role in this system given its outsized financial resources, political power, and ostensible commitment to an international “rules-based” order. Over the past 15 years, the U.S. government developed internal prevention expertise and capacity in the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and the Office of Global Criminal Justice; the U.S. Agency for International Development; and the U.S. Institute of Peace. President Barack Obama established the Atrocities Prevention Board (later Task Force), and Congress passed the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act, aimed at elevating and integrating atrocity prevention into American foreign policy. President Donald Trump has since dismantled most of these institutional capacities and programs, while withdrawing support for much of the global prevention system.
The slashing of the United States government’s expertise and programming will certainly have ripple effects for ongoing prevention efforts around the world. The bigger reality we must confront, however, is that the United States has never been a reliable partner in atrocity prevention. Trump’s authoritarianism and his genocidal threats are in some ways extraordinary and unquestionably dangerous, but the United States has a long history of perpetuating, facilitating, and/or ignoring atrocities when it believes it is in its interest to do so. This includes certain actions during the last two decades in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and most recently during Joe Biden’s presidency through its complicity in the Gaza genocide.
As we debate how to rebuild this global atrocity prevention architecture, it is important to grapple with these realities and not simply return to the past. The United States is unreliable, and the United Nations, barring some unlikely institutional reinvention, is ineffective. Looking forward, we should consider how to “decenter” atrocity prevention away from Washington and New York and build prevention capacity and networks across wider actors, institutions, and regions. This should include long-term efforts to:
- Strengthen regional and local civil society prevention networks, so that expertise, capacity, practical support, and leadership are grounded in regional, national, and local contexts, where needs are best understood.
- Reinvigorate networks among like-minded states and regional intergovernmental organizations to help coordinate and streamline collective prevention strategies tailored to the needs of particular regions. This will take time, as many regional organizations are currently under-capacitated, feckless, or averse to confronting member states.
- Develop and implement long-term national prevention strategies and train government officials in prevention norms, policies, and building political will for prevention – to include addressing the root causes of instability and injustices.
- Cultivate wider and overlapping funding networks to provide some insulation from capricious policy shifts from major donors like the U.S. government.
Clearly, we should not dismiss the United States’ important role and influence. We need to expand the American public’s understanding of atrocity prevention by engaging schools, local chambers of commerce, legal organizations, community groups, political and religious networks, and other civil society actors to educate and build public coalitions for atrocity prevention at home and abroad. But the challenges are significant and will require new thinking involving a wider range of actors. The measures listed above are not easily implemented, nor are they the full range of what needs to be done. Still, it is clear that the overreliance on one fickle superpower is untenable. We cannot revert to the status quo ante, which has now revealed its feet of clay.
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About the Author
Ernesto Verdeja is an associate professor of peace studies and global politics in the Keough School of Global Affairs and a core faculty member of its Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.
Recommended Citation
Verdeja, Ernesto. “One Indispensable Nation? Decentering the Global Atrocity Prevention Architecture.” Peace Policy: Solutions to Violent Conflict, No. 64, (April 2026). https://doi.org/10.7274/32108533
