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Ending Atrocity Crimes: The False Promise of Fatalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2018

Alex J. Bellamy
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Abstract

How should the international community respond when states commit atrocity crimes against sections of their own population? In practice, international responses are rarely timely or decisive. To make matters worse, half-hearted or self-interested interventions can prolong crises and contribute to the growing toll of casualties. Recognizing these brutal realities, it is tempting to adopt the fatalist view that the best that can be done is to minimize harm by letting the state win, allowing the status quo power structure to persist. Indeed, this is how many commentators and states have responded to the tide of human misery in Syria. Could a policy of letting the state perpetrator prevail be a viable alternative to other options, including military intervention? This essay suggests not. It explains the logic behind the fatalist approach and shows that problems of recurrence, precedence, and rights mean that such an approach cannot offer a plausible alternative to measures designed to resist and increase the costs of committing atrocity crimes.

Keywords

atrocitiesdiplomacyhumanitarianwarvictorySyriastatesprotection
Type
Roundtable: Alternatives to War
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , Fall 2018 , pp. 329 - 337
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2018 

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References

NOTES

1 Max Boot, “To Save Syrians, Let Assad Win,” Washington Post, March 8, 2018.

2 Luttwak, Edward, “Give War a Chance,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 4 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Phrasing taken from Lebow, Richard Ned, The Tragic Vision of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

4 Drawing on the data I presented in Bellamy, Alex J., “When States Go Bad: The Termination of State Perpetrated Mass Killing,” Journal of Peace Research 52, no. 5 (2015), pp. 565–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Bellamy, “When States Go Bad,” pp. 570–72.

6 Toft, Monica D., Securing the Peace: The Durable Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 United Nations Security Council, 6810th meeting, July 19, 2012, UN doc. S/PV.6810, p. 13.

8 Sarah Teitt, “China and the Failure of the UN in Syria,” International Political Science Association, 2018, forthcoming. A Chinese language version of this paper has been published.

9 Abouzeid, Rania, No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), pp. 20–23Google Scholar.

10 A point made with respect to the Arab Spring by Lynch, Marc, The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016), p. xviiiGoogle Scholar.