Meeting the moral and political challenges posed by genocide and mass atrocity requires conceptual clarity and historical acuity. Raphael Lemkin, famous for coining the term genocide, well understood these needs. Concerning the need for conceptual clarity, Lemkin wrote, “When people think about [a] new phenomenon, when they speak about it fervently, when they finally reach out for action in connection with this phenomenon, they must have a name for it.”1 Concerning the need for historical acuity, he observed, “One cannot describe a crime by one example; one must rather draw on all available experiences of the past.”2
In this study, I have named and explained many different roles that norms perform before, during, and after large-scale crimes. I have defined the notion of norm inversion and compared it to alternative processes of norm erosion and norm evasion. I have suggested that soldiers and humanitarian aid workers rely on moral norms against deliberation when facing recurrent moral dilemmas, and described several pathways by which those norms might be revised. At the institutional level, I have argued that political leaders commonly employ legal norms to legitimate persecution or deny atrocities and have spotlighted changes in international law designed to end to impunity for such crimes. Finally, I have shown that social norms, though typically portrayed by philosophers as informal bases of social stability, also help structure episodes of mass violence.
My analysis of the action-guiding power of norms in circumstances of mass atrocity has been informed by authors and scholars in many fields. For my basic account of norm acceptance and norm guidance, I have drawn from philosophers working in meta-ethics, particularly those pursuing naturalistic accounts of norm cognition. For my understanding of the etiology of mass atrocities I have relied on the work of historians, political scientists, and sociologists—even while contesting some of their specific explanatory claims. From the start, I have been inspired by the testimony of survivors of large-scale crimes, who exhibit great courage in reprising their experiences of terror, loss, and abjection, and who provide the clearest picture of life during mass atrocities. Finally, I have learned caution from commentators like Lawrence Langer who contend that out of the “ruins of memory” wrought by large-scale crimes, no special insights into human dignity or human duties can be retrieved.3
Given the particular structure of this study—with its separate sections addressing moral, legal, and social norms—readers may be left with lingering questions about the ways in which these three types of norms work together, or work against each other. What happens when institutions nominally governed by egalitarian legal norms are infiltrated by discriminatory social norms? How do the practical commitments and normative attitudes that individuals campaigning for changes in moral norms hold alter when those norms ultimately come to be enshrined in legal prohibitions or prescriptions? And how, in the real world, can disputes about the normative status or prescriptive force of a particular norm or set of norms be resolved?4
In response to this last question, we may return to the case of the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) discussed in chapter 1 and consider how the analytical framework developed in this study improves our understanding of the status of this much-contested norm.5
Conceived as a response to the international community’s mixed record of humanitarian intervention during the 1990s, the concept of the Responsibility to Protect was first articulated in writing in the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001.6 The specific content of this proto-norm was clarified in the report of the 2005 UN World Summit and in UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s 2009 report, Implementing the Responsibility to Protect. Particularly after the invocation of R2P in the Security Council’s authorization of air strikes in Libya in 2011, postcolonial, feminist, and pacifist critics raised objections to this new normative approach to sovereignty and the use of force.7 Today, though state actors seem less enthused about R2P, legal scholars and activists remain immersed in what Sarah Sewall has described as “a period of ferment and experimentation regarding what [this] norm entails in practice.”8
One major part of this ferment consists in debates about what exactly it means to call R2P a norm, what evidence should count in favor of that judgment, and what practical consequences, if any, follow from such determinations. The analytical framework laid out in this book offers help on each of these fronts. In the first place, I would suggest, debates ostensibly about whether R2P should be called a norm are frequently better understood as debates about whether it has achieved the status of a legal norm. For example, Alex Bellamy and Edward Luck, in their recent book The Responsibility to Protect: From Promise to Practice, suggest that one issue “complicat[ing] the question of evaluating whether R2P is a norm” is that “governments and international relations experts mean different things when they use the word ‘norm.’”9 On the one hand, “governments tend to view norms as binding legal principles”; on the other hand, international relations scholars conceive norms as “shared expectations of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity.”10 What Bellamy and Luck overlook is the fact that these comments do not necessarily implicate two different general conceptions of norms but may equally refer to two different orders of normativity. Advocates of the former view may wish to ask whether R2P has achieved the status of a legal norm. Advocates of the latter view may wish to argue that R2P has already achieved the status of a social norm. Interpreting the alternative positions in this way hardly dissolves the disagreement, but it does make possible a clearer understanding of its stakes.
A similar confusion runs through debates about what sort of evidence would confirm R2P’s status as a norm. Even scholars and activists unfamiliar with the analytical framework set forth in this study may be inclined to resist the suggestion, commonly advanced in the literature, that the Responsibility to Protect must become an object of consensus within the international community before it can gain the status of a norm.11 Setting aside this implausible proposal, the framework I have offered suggests that the kinds of evidence that could confirm R2P’s status as a norm vary depending on what particular type of norm we suppose R2P to be. If it is a legal norm, we should expect to see R2P embedded in the practices of states and other institutional actors, and we should equally see the operation of standing procedural rules governing its emergence into those practices. If instead R2P is conceived as a moral norm, then the practical commitments and normative attitudes of individual actors (such as state leaders), linguistically expressed or indicated by actions, may furnish the best evidence of its status as accepted norm.12
Finally, what sort of norm we take R2P to be has consequences for its practical effects, and especially the effects of breaching it. As noted in chapter 1, current formulations of this doctrine refrain from portraying forcible protective actions undertaken by the international community as sanctions against leaders who fail to protect their citizens, and any subsequent legal accountability for those leaders is likely to be imposed under the auspices of international criminal law rather than R2P. The standard sanctions deployed by international norm entrepreneurs, naming and shaming, tend to work best when state actors have publicly signed on to relevant treaties, conventions, or other legal instruments, though they can also be employed where leaders have made merely verbal commitments to moral or social norms. Finally, as with the case of Lemkin’s earliest antigenocide advocacy, the conscience and moral commitments of individual state leaders may themselves provide an appropriate basis for pressing home the moral responsibilities articulated by R2P.13
If debates about the normative status of the Responsibility to Protect illustrate the possibility of overlap and ambiguity among moral, legal, and social norms, the activities of museums and other educational institutions that teach the history of large-scale crimes and claim to promote prevention suggest that distinctions among these several types of norms are already widely recognized. Museums and memorials devoted to mass atrocities, whether the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the Museo Memoria Y Tolerencia in Mexico City, or the Denkmal für die ermordeten Jüden Europas in Berlin, typically incorporate displays that confront their visitors with moral dilemmas. They also tend to elevate particular historical individuals and groups as moral exemplars. In framing education about large-scale crimes in this way, these institutions suggest that mass atrocities are a challenge to our received moral attitudes and commitments. They then go on to emphasize how invidious legal or social norms threaten to confound those commitments. A recent exhibition at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Some Were Neighbors,” focused in part on showing how social norms within communities exposed to the Holocaust undermined previously accepted moral norms and in part on demonstrating that other moral norms widely accepted by audiences today (for example, concerning the equality or inherent dignity of persons) were not held by members of relevant populations. Similarly, museum exhibitions on historical and contemporary large-scale crimes commonly highlight restrictive laws, at the domestic and international levels, that prevent effective emigration and asylum claims for those targeted for violence. Such presentations of pernicious legal and social norms take on new urgency when the countries hosting relevant museums are themselves roiled in immigration controversies or ruled by xenophobic ideologues. But the same political circumstances often force directors of such museums to resolve complex ethical challenges.14
Here, finally, a general conclusion about the study and teaching of mass atrocities emerges. Individual scholars and educational institutions working on these issues are not immune to moral conflicts and perhaps are not better equipped to deal with them than any other moral agents. However, because of the specific content of their endeavors and given their widely recognized position of norm leadership, a higher ethical standard applies to them. This recalls a point I raised early in this study, where I noted that although few individuals will ever be in a position to prevent mass atrocities, investigation of individual and institutional responses to such crimes may be of considerable value for addressing more routine moral conflicts. Civil disobedience or vocal defiance in the face of unjust laws that do not rise to the level of atrocity remains an important function for museums and educators to perform. Such institutions and individuals also occupy a ready platform for combating pernicious social norms. I do not mean to claim merely that museums and scholars of mass violence enjoy social permission to speak out on these topics. Rather, they are, and are rightly, expected to do so. This will remain true for as long as mass atrocities menace our individual moral commitments and our collective capacities for resistance.
1. Raphael Lemkin, “Introduction to Genocide,” in Lemkin on Genocide, ed. Steven Leonard Jacobs (New York: Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 21, 24. For a clear discussion of considerations affecting Lemkin’s coinage of the term genocide, see Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 41–45.
2. Donna-Lee Frieze, ed., Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 152.
3. Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
4. These questions are especially important given the mixture of norms typically in play in practical deliberations. As philosopher Neil Roughley remarks, “Adult judgements of what ought to be done all in all can involve a mixture of moral and conventional—and personal—considerations.” See Neil Roughley, “Moral Obligations from the Outside In,” in The Normative Animal? On the Anthropological Significance of Social, Moral, and Linguistic Norms, ed. Neil Roughley and Kurt Bayertz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 223.
5. I take no position here on the long-term, or near-term, viability of R2P as a norm in global politics.
6. Alex Bellamy and Edward Luck, The Responsibility to Protect: From Promise to Practice (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018), 18–19.
7. For a helpful survey of those objections, see Noele Crossley, “Is R2P Still Controversial? Continuity and Change in the Debate on ‘Humanitarian Intervention,’” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 31, no. 5 (2018): 415–436.
8. Sarah Sewall, “Military Options for Preventing Atrocity Crimes,” in The Responsibility to Prevent: Overcoming the Challenges of Atrocity Prevention, ed. Serena Sharma and Jennifer Welsh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 186.
9. Bellamy and Luck, Responsibility to Protect, 18.
10. Bellamy and Luck, Responsibility to Protect.
11. For the suggestion that consensus represents a necessary condition for R2P’s status as a norm, see, for example, Crossley, “Is R2P Still Controversial?” 416.
12. David Scheffer, “The Fate of R2P in the Age of Retrenchment,” in Globalization and its Impact on the Future of Human Rights and International Criminal Justice, ed. M. Cherif Bassiouni (Cambridge: Intersentia, 2015), 617.
13. Scheffer, “The Fate of R2P,” 627–628.
14. Those challenges are distinct from the aesthetic and symbolic challenges that Holocaust museums routinely face. For discussion, see Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Holocaust Memory Reframed (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 215–218; see also Oren Baruch Stier, Holocuast Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).