Description
This paper argues for the need to move the study of mass violence beyond the narrow confines of debates around the Responsibility to Protect and to establish a new field of ‘atrocity studies’. The discipline of IR has largely adopted R2P as the primary lens through which to view the prediction, prevention of, and response to mass atrocities over the last two decades, without sufficient reflection on the limitations of such an approach. This paper challenges this trend. It proceeds in three parts.
The first part argues that the problem of mass violence has been broadly addressed to date across various disciplines through the distinct, limited, and peculiarly unconnected fields of R2P studies and genocide studies - fields with considerable unfulfilled potential for overlap.
The second part evidences the parallel evolution of atrocity prevention as a distinct field of practice in recent decades through the inclination of practitioners to employ this alternative language, a development often erroneously conflated by academic observers with evidence of the influence of R2P.
The third part in turn argues for the establishment of atrocity prevention as a distinct multidisciplinary field of inquiry, and suggests - borrowing from David Scheffer - the alternative umbrella term of ‘atrocity studies’. It does so by further sketching out what this new field of inquiry might entail.
