Causes Of Genocide

Under the cover of war, perpetrators have often been able to easily commit genocide with very little opposition. Bartrop (2002, p. 522) believes that it was “the Great War which provided humans with the belief that they could, with impunity, slaughter massive numbers of their own kind”. Prior to this there were high death toll wars, but Bartrop argues that the Great War unlike others included large number of civilian deaths and changed the human psyche in understanding how effective mass killing could be and the ease at which could be used as a tool. War is thus seen to create opportunities in which those in control can consolidate power and eliminate who it sees as a threat to this control (Krain, 1997). Krain (1997) compared numerous cases

It thus falls largely on the international community to be aware of onset signs to prevent genocide, and in cases in which there appears no sign they ought to have an obligation to in some form restrain the severity of the killing. There are, however, several dilemmas in the prevention and intervention of genocide. Sanctions are one of the more recognisable foreign tools frequently used in the post-cold war climate. When there is political turmoil abroad but the international community has no high stakes in the outcome, the international community is more likely to engage in the use of sanctions as a seemingly cheaper alternative to that of a wide-scale intervention that may have unforgiving repercussions politically and economically. It highly recognised that sanctions are largely ineffectual. They also serve to exacerbate pre-existing conditions within states that are likely to lead to genocide. Weiss (1999) also found that sanctions were likely to place unwarranted burdens on civilian populations than the elites which are doing the harm. However, he goes on to suggest that sanctions give foreign governments the ability to be perceived as if they are taking action and to “…engage in cheap moralizing but refrain from serious engagement” (1999, p.

Humanitarian intervention is a relatively new concept in foreign policy, and as such many states are disinclined to use it despite the grave horrors that inaction lets occur. The most common objection to intervention is that it is contradictory to state notions of sovereignty. That is, a state should be free from interference by another. However, Walzer (2015) contends that states enter into a form of social contract in which they are responsible for the well-being of their citizens. In cases of genocide, states lose their right to sovereignty due to the very fact that their targeting of victim groups are at ends with their duty to