We saw in Chapter 5 that even as the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention, expectations of a post-genocidal world were undermined by genocide perpetrated by its member-states and others, in some of which the UN itself and Western powers were complicit. Following this, Chapter 6 showed that genocide was part of many political and armed conflicts during the era of the Cold War and decolonization. Moreover the idea of genocide was widely invoked, although the Convention was almost entirely in abeyance: neither the signatory states nor the UN itself took seriously their duties to ‘prevent and punish’. This situation appeared to change with the end of the Cold War, which ushered in a new era of genocide awareness and anti-genocidal policy making. However I shall argue in this chapter that the transition of the late 1980s, like that of the late 1940s, involved a change in the pattern of genocide and its relation to the international system, rather than a decisive shift towards suppressing it.

Genocide prevention as a Western and UN interest

Major changes in the international political significance of genocide certainly developed around the end of the Cold War. The UN Security Council, liberated from the automatic vetoes of the Cold War period, authorized more peacekeeping missions and set up the International Criminal Tribunals for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR), the first international legal bodies since 1946 to indict perpetrators and the first ever to apply the genocide charge (Schabas 2006). Western states, sometimes with UN backing, embarked on what was called ‘humanitarian intervention’ to halt violence against civilian populations (Wheeler 2000). After a chequered history of intervention across the world during the first post-Cold War decade, this development was formalized in 2006 with the UN's adoption of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principles (Bellamy 2009).