To End Genocide is to Protect the Most Basic Human Rights

There is no greater deprivation, no more severe violation of the most basic of human rights than the act of genocide. The systematic attempt to annihilate an entire group of people, along with the other mass atrocity crimes covered on this blog, are a denial of the most basic rights to life, liberty, and security of person -- without which no other rights can be enjoyed -- not only of individuals, but entire civilian populations. Few things are as unambiguous: Nothing is more basic than the right to exist.

It is fitting, then, that the Stop Genocide site is being linked in with Change.org's new Human Rights cause. Though the global fight against genocide has many faces, from humanitarian to military, it is at its core one concerned with protecting the basic rights of the world's most marginalized and threatened populations; it is fundamentally a human rights movement, about the most fundamental of human rights.

In the post-Cold War world, mass atrocity crimes are most often committed by multiple actors in the midst of complex armed conflicts. As a result, the movement against genocide must concern itself with a wide array of political processes and institutions, from conflict resolution to peacekeeping to democratization to global economics, without losing sight of the primacy of individual rights as our central object of concern. Protecting vulnerable populations from mass atrocity is not only about drawing attention to the crimes and demanding action, but of digging into highly technical issues like peacekeeping reform and arms control regimes -- of getting into the nitty-gritty, nuts-and-bolts of what civilian protection from genocide and mass atrocity actually entails.

Over the past year and a half, this blog has covered many of these issues, as well as those topics that are more obviously or directly about "human rights," and this will not change -- even posts that may seem only tangentially related to core human rights issues are written with the central concern of the protection of basic individual rights very much in mind. Writing about how to "stop genocide" in the context of a human rights cause is about more than the rights themselves, but the multitude of complex factors -- the shades of gray and least-worst options far more than the black and white absolutism of moral clarity -- that must be understood, analyzed, and ultimately changed in order to uphold them.

Photo credit: FDR Library