Description
This paper argues that International Relations scholarship needs to progress the study of mass atrocities beyond the narrow confines of enduring debates around the Responsibility to Protect. The discipline of IR has largely adopted R2P as the primary lens through which to view the prediction, prevention of, and response to genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, but without sufficient reflection on the limitations of such an approach. This paper challenges this trend. In doing so, it proceeds in three parts. The first part argues that the problem of mass atrocities has to date been addressed across various academic disciplines through the distinct and relatively unconnected fields of R2P Studies and Genocide Studies. These remain limited fields of inquiry with considerable unfulfilled potential for overlap. The second part evidences the parallel evolution of atrocity prevention as a distinct field of practice over the last two decades, a development that continues to be erroneously conflated with evidence of the influence of R2P. The third part builds on these prevailing scholarly limitations by calling for the establishment of atrocity prevention as a distinct multidisciplinary field of academic inquiry. Borrowing from the work of David Scheffer on the importance of unifying terms, it suggests the alternative umbrella of Atrocity Studies and offers a preliminary sketch of what this new field of inquiry might entail.
