An Assessment of the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect

Executive Summary

This report examines the work of the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect (OSAPG). The Office has two Special Advisers, one for genocide (atrocity) prevention and the other for the responsibility to protect, and a small staff and budget. The OSAPG is tasked with collecting information on mass atrocities, identifying countries at high-risk for atrocities, advising the Secretary-General and Security Council, facilitating information sharing and analysis among United Nations (UN) agencies, and developing the responsibility to protect principle for purposes of implementation.

The report is based on interviews with over fifty people from the UN, UN member states, and civil society, including people who have worked in the Office; documents produced by the Office and various UN entities and agencies; civil society reports and studies; and scholarly research. The report details our findings on how the OSAPG interfaces with other offices and mandates in the UN system, presents a brief history of the OSAPG, and assesses the mandate and effectiveness of the OSAPG.

The report finds that the Office is not a central actor in contemporary policy work on atrocity prevention (AP) and the responsibility to protect (R2P). The report identifies several factors that contribute to the sidelining of the OSAPG. These broadly include:

• A dual mandate of AP and R2P that has not been adequately clarified conceptually or programmatically, which has created operational challenges over time and specifically has resulted in the sidelining of the R2P mandate.
• An inability of the OSAPG to fully exploit its convening power with potential UN partners.
• A marked decrease in engagement with member states on AP and R2P. 
• Limited internal analytical capacity on AP and R2P.
• Limited access to the Secretary-General’s office for key policy discussions concerning AP and R2P.
• A narrowing of the OSAPG’s work to focus on countering hate speech and engaging with religious leaders, while moving away from systematic AP and R2P work.
• A lack of engagement with key AP and R2P civil society partners.

The report concludes with twenty-four specific, interconnected recommendations for the UN system, the Secretary-General’s office, and the OSAPG. Broadly, these include:

For the UN system

• Identify upcoming opportunities in the UN, like the 2025 peacebuilding architecture review among others, where the Office can play a role in advancing AP and R2P.
• Work with the OSAPG to integrate AP and R2P into the activities of key UN partners.

For the Executive Office of the Secretary-General

• Better integrate the OSAPG Special Advisers into the relevant high-level policy meetings, and advocate for R2P in budget proposals.
• Direct a comprehensive mapping and review of the AP and R2P ecosystem in the UN.

For the OSAPG

• Clarify the conceptual, institutional, and programmatic relationship between the AP and R2P mandates. In particular, strengthen the Office’s work on R2P, which has been increasingly marginalized over several years.
• Prioritize the coordinator and convener role in the UN on AP and R2P, including gathering and sharing information and analyses.
• Share an overarching strategic atrocity prevention framework to help guide the UN, regional nongovernmental organizations, and member states, and reduce the degree of current ad hoc planning. The OSAPG’s brief “Strategy and Priorities” document is an important start.
• Develop an R2P implementation plan.
• Develop concrete case-specific atrocity prevention action plans for the Secretary-General and Security Council on particular high-risk cases, as part of the Office’s advising work.
• Produce annual AP and R2P reports that assess current risk trends, the status of prior recommendations, and current implementation efforts.
• Recommit to engaging with UN member state delegations to advance both AP and R2P.
• Recommit to civil society allies to advance AP and R2P.

Introduction

The United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect (OSAPG) was created to gather information on genocide and mass atrocities, serve as an early warning mechanism to the Secretary-General, advise the Secretary-General and UN Security Council on prevention, coordinate among UN agencies to strengthen information sharing and analysis, and elaborate the conceptual and practical dimensions of the responsibility to protect principle.¹We use the abbreviation OSAPG because it is currently used by the Office in official documents. In other publications, and in previous years, the Office has been referred to as the “Joint Office,” “OSAPGR2P,” or other abbreviations more inclusive of the “R2P” side of the joint mandate. In its early years, it was considered revolutionary, but over time its impact and relevance have diminished.

Since the establishment of the first special adviser position two decades ago, little has been written about the OSAPG.²See Rebecca Barber, “The UN Should Increase Support for the Responsibility to Protect,” Just Security, August 17, 2023, available from https://www.justsecurity.org/87571/the-un-should-increase-support-for-the-responsibility-to-protect/; Lawrence Woocher, “Developing a Strategy, Methods and Tools for Genocide Early Warning,” Center for International Conflict Resolution, Columbia University, 2006, available from https://www.un.org/ar/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/Woocher%20Early%20warning%20report,%202006-11-10.pdf; also see the sources cited below in this report. Many policy and practitioner insiders who know about the OSAPG are often at a loss to explain the actual role it plays inside the UN bureaucracy on preventing genocide and atrocity crimes and advancing the implementation of R2P. Similarly, not much is known about how the OSAPG operates in wider genocide and mass atrocity prevention ecosystems spanning civil society networks and related offices in member states.

The report details our findings about how the OSAPG interfaces with other offices and mandates in the UN system, presents a brief history of the OSAPG, and assesses the OSAPG’s mandate and effectiveness.³We thank our interviewees and the participants of the Atrocity Prevention Study Group for their insights, and James Finkel, Lisa Sharland, Juliet Weis, and the Stimson Center for the opportunity to work on this project. We also thank Marko Gural, Khya Morton, and Anka Whelan for their research assistance, and the research staff at the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library who facilitated access to key UN documents and databases. Even though the OSAPG participates in numerous events and issues many statements of concern, our findings show it remains marginalized in the prevention policy world. Our interviews suggest the OSAPG is unable to pursue its mandate effectively due to a lack of support from the UN leadership and system, its own risk-averse and narrow interpretation of its mandate, weakened relations with civil society actors, and a problematic internal structure that hampers its work and efficacy.⁴On the problematic mandate of the OSAPG, see William Schabas, “The Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and His Inscrutable Mandate,” in Rule of Law through Human Rights and International Criminal Justice: Essays in Honour of Adama Dieng, ed. Charles Riziki Majinge, 65-81 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015); Stephen McLoughlin, Jess Gifkins, and Alex J. Bellamy, “The Evolution of Mass Atrocity Early Warning in the UN Secretariat: Fit for Purpose?”, International Peacekeeping 30, no. 4 (2023): 477-505. We conclude with a set of specific recommendations for the OSAPG, the Secretary-General’s office, and the broader UN system.

Abbreviations

AP                        atrocity prevention (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing)

DPO                     UN Department of Peace Operations

DPPA                   UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs

EOSG                   UN Executive Office of the Secretary-General

OCHA                  UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

OHCHR               UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

OSAPG                UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect

R2P                      responsibility to protect

SAPG                   UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide

SARP                    UN Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect

SG                        UN Secretary-General

UNHCR                UN High Commissioner for Refugees

UNSC                   UN Security Council

Methods and Sources

This report draws on semi-structured interviews and background conversations with over 50 people, conducted mostly virtually between October 2023 and April 2024. Interviewees included former Special Advisers and staff of the OSAPG;⁵Staff from the Office agreed to respond to a set of written questions from the authors in November 2023. However, despite subsequent inquiries from November 2023 to April 2024, the authors did not receive a response. Upon receipt of a prepublication courtesy copy of the final draft report from the Stimson Center to the Office in July 2024, OSAPG staff provided comments in July and again in October. Those responses have been reflected in the analysis of this report. highly placed officials in the UN bureaucracy and in governments; and rank and file civil servants working on atrocity prevention and R2P from North America, Western Europe, and South Asia and Asia Pacific. We interviewed civil society prevention and R2P practitioners working in peacebuilding and conflict resolution/prevention organizations in North and South America, West Africa, East Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Asia Pacific region. Finally, interviewees included scholars from around the world with expertise on the OSAPG, genocide and atrocity prevention, and R2P.

We asked respondents to review a substantial questionnaire, which served as the basis for our interviews.⁶Most interviews lasted an hour. In several cases, we had subsequent interviews. Nearly all interviewees requested full confidentiality in order to speak frankly. Thus, we opted not to name anyone in the report. Some interviewees preferred to write extensive comments to us, especially those who needed to clear their answers with their employers. Others were prohibited from sharing written answers but were permitted to speak with us. Indeed, assessing the impact of the OSAPG today is difficult, given that much of its public-facing work consists of reports, statements, and briefings without a clear sense of their practical consequences and institutional uptake. The mandate letter of the OSAPG indicates that the SAPG should conduct its work “without excessive publicity,”⁷Secretary-General, “Letter to the President of the Security Council,” S/2004/567, 13 July 2004. which reinforces the view that the Special Adviser’s portfolio is primarily aimed at informing and shaping internal UN deliberations on atrocity scenarios, particularly with the EOSG and the Security Council. Questions over where the Office’s efforts should be directed, and who its primary audiences are, have been contentious since its earliest days.⁸See Aidan Hehir, “An Analysis of Perspectives on the Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 5, no. 3 (2010): 258-276; and see Deborah Mayersen, “Current and Potential Capacity for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities within the United Nations System,” Global Responsibility to Protect 3, no. 2 (2011): 197-222. A key source of information thus remains interviews with people who have worked closely with or inside the OSAPG. Interviews provide insights that are otherwise difficult to obtain when relying solely on published materials and public statements.⁹Interviewees have particular perspectives based on the time period, nature, and extent of their interactions with the OSAPG. We were keen to identify similar observations made by multiple interview subjects and draw on multiple sources to determine what may explain discrepancies in perspectives. Nevertheless, we underscore the remarkable consistency of views among our interlocutors – particularly those who have had extensive experience with the OSAPG over time – which provides substantial confidence that our observations and assessments are based on reliable information. Interviewees showed little variation in their evaluations of the Office; the differences arose over what should be done moving forward.

We also examined a range of documents, including the Office’s published reports, briefings, speeches, and announcements of the past twenty years, as well as its social media and internet postings; the Secretary-General’s annual activity reports and budget documents discussing the OSAPG; other UN reports and documents that refer to the OSAPG, including from the Secretary-General, General Assembly, Human Rights Council, Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, and other agencies; government and intergovernmental organization reports; nongovernmental organization policy reports; and academic studies.

Context

The OSAPG consists of a Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide (SAPG) and a Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect (SARP). The SAPG position was established in 2004, and the SARP position followed in 2008. The Office has a small budget and a small staff, normally under 15 people, based at UN headquarters in New York. The Special Advisers have distinct, though in principle complementary, mandates.

The SAPG is mandated with collecting information on grave human rights violations, providing early warning to the Secretary-General, advising the SG and UNSC on prevention strategies, and coordinating agencies within the UN system to strengthen internal information sharing and analysis.¹⁰Secretary-General, “Letter to the President of the Security Council,” S/2004/567, 13 July 2004. Although the position title refers to genocide, in practice the mandate has been interpreted as focusing on the wider category of “atrocities,” which includes the crimes of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, as well as ethnic cleansing. The SARP is tasked with developing the responsibility to protect principle for purposes of operationalization.¹¹General Assembly, Resolution A/Res/60/1, 24 October 2005, para. 138-140; Secretary-General, “Implementing the responsibility to protect,” A/63/677, 12 January 2009. We discuss the Office in detail later, but here we outline the general context in which it operates.

The OSAPG exists within a broader ecosystem of AP and R2P work, a system of partially overlapping networks of actors functioning at multiple levels, from the global and international to the regional, national, and subnational. AP and R2P are related insofar as both are centered on the prevention of significant human rights violations against civilian populations, in particular mass atrocities. AP and R2P have some of the same intellectual origins and respond to similar galvanizing moments, such as the 1990s genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, but they also differ in some respects.

Atrocity prevention refers to the range of strategies, policies, practices, and institutions directed toward anticipating and stopping the onset of genocide and other atrocity crimes prior to their onset or reoccurrence. AP is not institutionalized in a specific norm or law, though it draws on a body of international human rights and humanitarian law as well as extensive practitioner and scholarly bodies of knowledge.¹²James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Kerry Whigham, “From Holocaust Studies to Atrocity Prevention: Genocide Studies and the Growth of Transdisciplinary Activist Scholarship,” Social Research 90, no. 4 (2023): 809-836; Ernesto Verdeja, “Critical Genocide Studies and Mass Atrocity Prevention,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 13, no. 3 (2019): 111-127.

R2P, on the other hand, is often referred to as an “international norm that seeks to ensure that the international community never again fails to halt genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity,”¹³Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, “Responsibility to Protect Background Briefing,” n.d., accessed March 15, 2024, https://www.globalr2p.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/R2P-Backgrounder-Updated-January-2021.pdf. The UN refers to R2P as a principle, but many organizations call it a norm. and focuses on a state’s responsibility to protect its population, the international community’s responsibility to assist states in doing so, and the international community’s responsibility to protect when a state is failing to do so.¹⁴Karen Smith, “R2P at the UN: The Problem of Selective History and Incomplete Narratives,” Global Responsibility to Protect 14, no. 3 (2022): 273-276; Alexander Bellamy and Edward Luck, The Responsibility to Protect: From Promise to Practice (London: Polity Press, 2018); Ramesh Thakur and Thomas Weiss, “R2P: From Idea to Norm – and Action?”, Global Responsibility to Protect 1, no. 1 (2009): 22-53. The precise conceptual relationship between AP and R2P is a matter of scholarly and practitioner debate.¹⁵Cecelia Jacob, “If Mass Atrocity Prevention Has a Future, the Responsibility to Protect Can’t Afford to Be Niche,” Just Security, November 14, 2023, available from https://www.justsecurity.org/90031/if-mass-atrocity-prevention-has-a-future-the-responsibility-to-protect-cant-afford-to-be-niche/; Simon Adams, Mass Atrocities, the Responsibility to Protect and the Future of Human Rights (New York: Routledge, 2021); Alexander Bellamy, “The Discomforts of Politics: What Future for Atrocity Prevention?”, Just Security, October 31, 2023, available from https://www.justsecurity.org/89832/the-discomforts-of-politics-what-future-for-atrocity-prevention/. This debate has consequences for the Office’s own operations and self-understanding, especially because the OSAPG includes separate Special Advisers in these two areas.

Within the UN system, there are several entities involved in AP and R2P work. The UN Security Council is perhaps the central venue for engaging with these issues. And yet the UNSC’s deep dysfunction, intensifying competition between global powers, problematic use of vetoes, and attacks on R2P by some members have significantly weakened the Security Council’s ability to prevent or respond to atrocity crimes.¹⁶Jennifer Traham, Existing Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). But also see Jennifer Welsh, “The Security Council’s Role in Fulfilling the Responsibility to Protect,” Ethics and International Affairs 35, no. 2 (2021): 227-243.

However, the global atrocity prevention ecosystem is not reducible to the UNSC. D’Alessandra and Whidden refer to the “potentially numerous ‘hidden’ or ‘alternative’ sites of atrocity prevention at the U.N., particularly with respect to ‘upstream’ or ‘systemic’ prevention.”¹⁷Federica D’Alessandra and Gwendolyn Whidden, “Whither Atrocity Prevention at the UN? Look Beyond R2P and the Security Council,” Stimson Center, November 6, 2023, available from https://www.stimson.org/2023/whither-atrocity-prevention-at-the-un-look-beyond-r2p-and-the-security-council/. “Upstream” atrocity prevention and R2P overlap conceptually with many basic practices of good governance that are key areas of attention for other parts of the UN system, such as democratization, economic development, and the protection of human rights. The overlap means that the practical task of preventing atrocity crimes involves a wide set of actors, including the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, the Department of Peace Operations, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the Human Rights Council, the International Court of Justice, various commissions of inquiry, and Special Representatives of the Secretary-General. The OSAPG is meant to coordinate information from these sources into a coherent and actionable analysis for the Secretary-General and his Executive Office, and the UNSC.

The larger international ecosystem of atrocity prevention and R2P, beyond the United Nations, includes tribunals like the International Criminal Court and regional and domestic courts; regional and subregional intergovernmental organizations (e.g., African Union Peace and Security Department and Continental Early Warning System); government agencies tasked with analysis and policy formulation (e.g., the U.S. State Department Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, the U.S. Atrocity Prevention Task Force); a host of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), like the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, and Protection Approaches; and various networks like the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect, the Global Network of R2P Focal Points, the European Network of R2P Focal Points, Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes, the Latin American Network for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, Group of Friends of the Responsibility to Protect, the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s Prevention and Protection Working Group and the Stimson Center’s Atrocity Prevention Study Group.

By title and mandate, the OSAPG should sit at the center of this complex ecosystem.  The OSAPG staff uphold that the Office continues to play an important role in prevention and response, and that the OSAPG is well integrated into the various early warning and prevention mechanisms in the UN system as demonstrated by the Office’s participation in the Deputies Committee, Executive Committee, Regional Monthly Reviews, Senior Management Group, as well as relevant country and thematic Working Groups and Inter-Agency Task Forces. Nevertheless, despite its purported centrality, interviewees, including past Special Advisers, maintain the OSAPG has long been marginalized and lacks the functional effectiveness it once had. Our interviewees spoke about this within the context of a general institutional decline in the UN system of AP and R2P priorities, which comes at a time when the international architectures for mass atrocity prevention are under unprecedented attack by many UN member states.

Office Formation, Consolidation, and Current Configuration

Over the past twenty years, there have been ten Special Advisers: four for genocide prevention, and six for the responsibility to protect (Table 1). The status and influence of the Special Advisers has waxed and waned, a function of the relative resources accorded to each as well as their relationships to changing Secretary-Generals and the broader shifting dynamics within the UN and global politics. Nevertheless, we can identify three broad periods – formation, consolidation, and the present – which correspond to the tenure of SAPGs, given their status as the de facto office heads.

Table 1: Special Advisers

2004-2012: Formation

In April 2004, ten years after the Rwandan genocide and in the midst of the genocide and mass atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced a Five-Point Action Plan for genocide prevention. It called for focusing on preventing armed conflict, the protection of civilians, ending impunity, an early warning system and analytical capacity for identifying genocidal risks, and a process for swift and decisive collective actions for prevention.¹⁸Secretary-General, “Report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of the Five Point Action Plan and the activities of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide,” A/HRC/7/37, Human Rights Council, 2008. It followed several unsuccessful early warning efforts,¹⁹Stephen McLoughlin, Jess Gifkins, and Alexander Bellamy, “The Evolution of Mass Atrocity Early Warning in the UN Secretariat: Fit for Purpose?”, International Peacekeeping 30, no. 4 (2023): 477-483. and provided a framework for creating a senior position to coordinate and advise on genocide prevention.

Shortly afterwards, Annan laid out the mandate of a new Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide to the President of the UN Security Council.²⁰Secretary-General, “Letter to the President of the Security Council,” S/2004/567, 13 July 2004. The Secretary-General proposed an adviser tasked with four key responsibilities:

1. Collect existing information, in particular from within the United Nations system, on massive and serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law of ethnic and racial origin that, if not prevented or halted, might lead to genocide;
2. Act as a mechanism of early warning to the Secretary-General, and through the SG to the Security Council, by identifying potential situations that could result in genocide;
3. Make recommendations to the Security Council, through the Secretary-General, on actions to prevent or halt genocide;
4. Liaise with the United Nations system on activities for the prevention of genocide and work to enhance the United Nations capacity to analyze and manage information relating to genocide or related crimes.

These four tasks set out the basic parameters of the SAPG’s work. The SAPG mandate was endorsed in the World Summit Outcome Document adopted by the High-level Plenary Meeting of the sixtieth session of the General Assembly.²¹General Assembly, Resolution A/Res/60/1, 24 October 2005. In practice, the SAPG was to focus on atrocity crimes, which includes the crimes of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, as well as ethnic cleansing.

In 2004, Annan selected the Argentine human rights lawyer Juan E. Méndez as the first SAPG at the rank of Assistant Under-Secretary. Méndez proposed a broad UN prevention approach aimed at protecting civilian populations from serious human rights violations, establishing accountability mechanisms for perpetrators, securing humanitarian relief and access to basic economic, social, and cultural rights for vulnerable populations, and strengthening UN support for peace agreements and transitional processes.²²Secretary-General, “Report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of the Five Point Action Plan and the activities of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide,” E/CN.4/2006/84, Commission on Human Rights, 9 March 2006.

Less than a year into his term as UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon appointed the South Sudanese diplomat Francis Deng as the new SAPG on August 1, 2007. Deng was appointed at the elevated rank of Under Secretary-General. He had previously served as the UN Special Representative on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons for twelve years and had elaborated the principle of “sovereignty as responsibility,”²³Francis Deng, Sadikiel Kimaro, Terrence Lyons, Donald Rothschild, and I. William Zartman, Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1996). which anticipated the responsibility to protect later adopted by the UN. During Deng’s tenure as Special Adviser, the Five-Point Action Plan continued as an organizing framework for prevention. Deng’s early priorities, detailed in Ban Ki-moon’s 2008 report to the Human Rights Council, underscore this.²⁴Secretary-General, “Report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of the Five Point Action Plan and the activities of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide,” A/HRC/7/37, Human Rights Council, 2008. Deng also participated in a wide range of thematic consultations throughout this period, and was frequently dispatched by Ban Ki-moon to report on ongoing crises, including in Kenya in 2007-2008.

Ban Ki-moon sought to strengthen the responsibility to protect and, in February 2008, he selected Edward Luck, an American political scientist with expertise on the Security Council, as the first Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect. The SARP was tasked with developing the responsibility to protect principle outlined in the 2005 UN World Summit Outcome Document, which was later elaborated as consisting of three pillars:²⁵See General Assembly, Resolution A/Res/60/1, 24 October 2005, para. 138-140; on the elaboration of the three pillars, see Secretary-General, “Implementing the responsibility to protect,” A/63/677, 12 January 2009.

1. The responsibility of each state to protect its population;
2. The international community’s responsibility to assist states in that protection, and;
3. The international community’s responsibility to protect when a state is manifestly failing to do so.

The new Special Adviser was expected to focus on elaborating the conceptual underpinnings and ultimately the practical operational policies and mechanisms needed to make R2P an effective part of UN prevention work. Nevertheless, the SARP did not enjoy the same status as the SAPG. The former was given the lower rank of Assistant Secretary-General and afforded the symbolic annual salary of $1 (unlike the SAPG, who draws a regular UN salary). This imbalance in salary created an asymmetric relationship between the two positions in the Office, as the SARP was forced to draw an income from external sources, often in full-time employment in academia or civil society. This funding imbalance, furthermore, incentivized the Office to follow donor-funded projects and trainings to secure the money necessary for keeping the proverbial lights on in the Office, according to several interviewees.

In 2008, the new SARP position was supported by most member states, except China, Cuba, and Russia, whose delegations were opposed to providing any significant support for either Special Adviser’s mandate. R2P’s efficacy was tested immediately by several crises, including Russia’s 2008 attack on Georgia, the civil war in Libya in 2011, and the failure of a coherent and robust UNSC response to the Syrian conflict, all of which revealed its limitations in the face of power politics and underscored the significant practical challenges confronting the new Special Adviser.

The creation of the SARP position resulted in a new joint Office in 2010.²⁶See the following: Francis Deng, “From ‘Sovereignty as Responsibility’ to the ‘Responsibility to Protect’,” Global Responsibility to Protect 2, no. 4 (2010): 353-370; Ekkehard Strauss, “Institutional Capacities of the United Nations to Prevent and Halt Atrocity Crimes,” in The Responsibility to Prevent: Overcoming the Challenges of Atrocity Prevention, ed. Jennifer Mary Welsh and Serena K. Sharma, 38-82 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Ekkehard Strauss, “A Short Story of a Long Effort: The United Nations and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities,” in Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention, ed. Alex Zucker, Sheri P. Rosenberg, and Tibi Galis, 428-450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Some interviewees noted that at the time there was widespread hope that the two advisers would play complementary roles in advancing prevention and response work both within the UN bureaucracy and with member states: “we thought this would strengthen both the responsibility to protect and genocide prevention,” said one civil society practitioner.

It is difficult to determine the Office’s exact budget and personnel size,²⁷We examined every available budget document since 2004 concerning the SAs and the Office, but comparisons over time are difficult to make for several reasons: the budget categories and format change over time (typically in the Secretary-General’s funding requests); the Office has not always spent the amount appropriated (sometimes more, sometimes less); the exact breakdown and purpose of donor state contributions is not available for every year; and some budget proposals are biennial and others are annual. Nevertheless, the “proposed programme budget” documents include information on prior year budgets, which are the sources for our numbers. Additionally, the reported staff size does not always include interns nor people seconded to the Office from elsewhere in the UN, who may work part-time or not complete a full year. but from 2009 to 2012 the office expanded to around 11 people, with some fluctuation. In 2009, the budget was about $1.7 million, but over the next three years it increased to about $2.5 million per year, not counting “extrabudgetary” contributions by donor countries (in 2012 this totaled $690,000, for example).²⁸Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2012-2013,” 12 September 2011, A/66/354/Add.1, para. 89-95; Secretary-General, “Programme budget for the biennium 2012-2013,” 5 September 2012, A/67/346/Add.1, para. 80-87. This did not include an “extrabudgetary contribution” of about $690,000 in 2012, para 85. Nevertheless, both internal UN and external sources state that this was below what the Office needed to conduct its work. The Office maintains that it provides adequate support for R2P programming, but many interviewees suggested that a majority of the funding and personnel allocation went to atrocity prevention, not the responsibility to protect, though the authors could not completely verify this in the funding priorities documents and performance reviews produced by the Secretary-General.²⁹See Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2012-2013,” 12 September 2011, A/66/354/Add.1; Secretary-General, “Programme budget for the biennium 2012-2013,” 5 September 2012, A/67/346/Add.1.

2012-2020: Consolidation

In 2012, Deng was replaced by Adama Dieng, a Senegalese human rights lawyer and former Registrar of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Dieng served the longest tenure of any SAPG and played a pivotal role in shaping the position. He focused his early years on Africa but also endorsed a systematic approach to atrocity prevention that emphasized creating a general analytical model for atrocity assessment. U.S. government policy analysts we interviewed credit Dieng with helping generate support for atrocity prevention legislation, which in turn mobilized American domestic support for the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act.

Dieng also spearheaded a global effort to establish “national committees” for genocide prevention, which resulted in important regional bodies in DR Congo, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda in 2012.³⁰See Samantha Capicotto and Scharf, Rob, “National Mechanisms for the Prevention of Atrocity Crimes,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 11, no. 3 (2018): 6-19. An emerging scholarly consensus points to the important role these offices have played in deescalating conflicts and building local capacities for preventing genocide through a wide variety of approaches.³¹Liberata Mulamula and Ashad Sentongo, “An African regional perspective on prevention Experiences from the Great Lakes Region,” in Preventing Mass Atrocities: Policies and Practices, ed. Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr, (London: Routledge, 2018), 144-155; Ashley L. Greene and Ashad Sentongo, “Assessing National Mechanisms for Atrocity Prevention in Africa’s Great Lakes Region,” Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 14, no. 2 (2019): 193–205.

SARP Luck resigned in 2012 and was replaced in 2013 by Jennifer Welsh, a prominent Canadian scholar with extensive expertise on the responsibility to protect, the Security Council, and the ethics and law of armed conflict. The OSAPG continued to pursue its general goals of analysis, advising, and advocacy.³²The Office is mandated with pooling information from various sources within the UN for purposes of analysis and advising. The existing documentation on the quality and breadth of sources is difficult to evaluate, a point echoed by various UN officials whom we interviewed; for instance, the Office reports that in 2013 it drew on 175 “consistent and reliable sources of information, primarily from within the United Nations system, collected on a daily basis.” The estimate for 2014 was 200 sources, and the target for 2015 was 225. It is not clear what to make of these metrics, which in any case have changed over time, and currently no comparable metrics are available. See Secretary-General, “Programme budget for the biennium 2014-2015,” 3 September 2014, A/69/363/Add.1, Table 8/c. During these years, the Office had a particular focus on collaboration with organizations in Africa and the Americas, such as the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region in Africa and the Organization of American States.³³Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2014-2015,” A/68/327/Add.1, para. 65-67.  For a sense of what this work entailed, see Ashad Sentongo, “The Practical Use of Early Warning and Response in Preventing Mass Atrocities and Genocide: Experiences from the Great Lakes Region,” in Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention, ed. Alex Zucker, Sheri P. Rosenberg, and Tibi Galis, 450-476 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). And see Anslem Wongibeh Adunimay, Creating Peace and Security: The Contribution of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (master’s diss., University of Johannesburg, South Africa, 2017).

In 2014, the OSAPG released the Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes.³⁴Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes: A Tool for Prevention (2014). The Framework was intended to be a tool to help identify the main atrocity indicators and early warning signals that could be applied for prevention efforts across multiple contexts. The Framework drew on existing scholarly research and served as a reference for human rights organizations and governments.³⁵Adama Dieng and Jennifer Welsh, “Assessing the Risk of Atrocities,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 9, no. 3 (2016): 1-12. The OSAPG also worked closely with various national and regional atrocity prevention organizations across Africa and the Latin American Network for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention – a group of 18 member states from the region – as well as supporting the creation of national “focal points” on genocide prevention and R2P.³⁶Secretary-General, “Programme budget for the biennium 2014-2015,” 3 September 2014, A/69/363/Add.1, paras. 59-63. On the Latin American Network for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, see https://www.auschwitzinstitute.org/programs/latin-american-network-for-genocide-and-mass-atrocity-prevention.

In 2015 and 2016, Special Advisers Dieng and Welsh organized a series of meetings and consultations with religious leaders to develop strategies to prevent the incitement to violence. Known as the Fez Process, this culminated in a broad action plan for regionally specific prevention efforts led by religious actors.³⁷Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, “Plan of Action for Religious Leaders and Actors to Prevent Incitement to Violence that Could Lead to Atrocity Crimes,” New York, 2017, available from https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/publications-and-resources/Plan_of_Action_Religious-rev5.pdf. The Fez Process marked a turn toward a stronger thematic focus on religious civil society groups, which was something of a departure for the OSAPG from its earlier work. Since then, it has become central to its work today.³⁸The idea for the Office to engage religious leaders has been a long-term initiative, stemming from a commitment to include the voices of leaders from all faiths in atrocity prevention. Some interviewees suggested the Fez Process has been the Office’s most important, practical engagement in atrocity prevention over the last decade.³⁹For more, see Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, “Plan of Action for Religious Leaders and Actors to Prevent Incitement to Violence that Could Lead to Atrocity Crimes,” New York, 2017, 9, available from https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/publications-and-resources/Plan_of_Action_Religious-rev5.pdf; Secretary-General, “Remarks on the Launch of the Fez Plan of Action,” New York, 14 July 2017, available from https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2017-07-14/secretary-generals-remarks-the-launch-of-the-fez-plan-of-action-delivered.

Interviewees suggested that engagement with religious leaders through the Fez process opened avenues for Dieng to have greater political engagement in the Central African Republic and Burundi. A number of interviewees also noted that Dieng led efforts in 2016 to create national mechanisms in those countries. These were particularly notable because atrocity crimes were being committed during active conflicts in both countries at that time.⁴⁰See https://media.un.org/unifeed/en/asset/d162/d1626206, accessed July 15, 2024. And See Ferdinand Mbirigi, “Assurance for Implementing the State’s Responsibility to Protect: Lessons from Burundian Practice,” Global Responsibility to Protect 15, no. 1 (2022): 30-47.

During this time, Welsh produced annual reports for the Secretary-General to the General Assembly and participated in the annual “informal interactive dialogues” with the General Assembly. She also worked to clarify and deepen the conceptual, legal, and operational elements necessary for implementing R2P, and her tenure was marked by important outreach efforts with civil society prevention groups.

In 2016, Ivan Šimonović was appointed the new SARP. Whereas Welsh was primarily a scholar with policy experience in the Canadian government and international relations, Šimonović had substantial experience in the UN system. He had previously served as Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, leading the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ New York Office, and he had helped advance the UN’s “Human Rights Up Front” agenda.

R2P remained of secondary importance and under-resourced in the OSAPG. Several interviewees noted the long-standing problems of lack of R2P funding and limited personnel, and in fact the SARP remained unpaid, unlike the SAPG. One former office member noted that the SARP had, at most, “the support of 0.5 personnel in an office of 10-11 people,” with the rest reporting directly to the SAPG. The imbalance predictably undermined the ability to advocate for R2P. Other interviewees stated that the lack of staff capacity over the past decade has resulted in “relying on external consultants” to produce the annual R2P report.⁴¹The R2P reports are available here: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/key-documents.shtml.

The OSAPG continued to provide various consultations and training assistance on genocide prevention, particularly in Africa. Some of these efforts were long-standing, such as with the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region on the implementation of the Protocol for the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity and all forms of Discrimination.⁴²Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2018-2019,” 30 August 2017, A/72/371/Add.1, para. 41. In other instances, the engagements appear to have been more “episodic” and “less sustained,” according to several government and civil society sources.

Šimonović stepped down and in early 2019 was replaced by Karen Smith, a noted South African scholar with substantial expertise on non-Western contributions to international relations and global governance. During her tenure, Smith wrote a number of reports on R2P, as well as “Women and Atrocity Prevention.”⁴³Karen Smith, “Women and Atrocity Prevention,” Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes, 28 October 2020, available at https://gaamac.org/2020/10/women-and-atrocity-prevention/.

The appropriated budget during 2013-2020 ranged from $2.1 million to $2.3 million annually. Donor countries’ “extrabudgetary contributions” fluctuated annually between a high of $785,000 (2014) to a low of $283,000 (2017), remaining around $500,000 in the latter years. The staff consisted of 10 people during this period.⁴⁴Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2014-2015,” 23 August 2013, A/68/327/Add.1; Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2014-2015,” 3 September 2014 A/69/363/Add.1; Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2016-2017,” 3 September 2015, A/70/348/Add.1; Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2016-2017,” 6 September 2016, A/71/365/Add.1; Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2018-2019,” 30 August 2017, A/72/371/Add.1; Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, “Third report on the proposed programme budget for 2020,” 25 September 2019, A/74/7/Add.2; Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, “Fourth report on the proposed programme budget for 2021,”  27 October 2020, A/75/7/Add.3.

2020-Present

After more than eight years as SAPG, Dieng left the Office in August 2020. Following the brief interim appointment of Pramila Patten as acting SAPG,⁴⁵See United Nations “Note to Correspondents: UN High-level Officials Express Deep Concern Over Escalating Ethnic Tensions in Ethiopia,” 12 November 2020, available from https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/note-correspondents/2020-11-12/note-correspondents-un-high-level-officials-express-deep-concern-over-escalating-ethnic-tensions-ethiopia. Secretary-General Guterres appointed Alice Wairimu Nderitu as the Special Adviser that November. The transition occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, which placed enormous strain on the UN system; key offices were forced to work remotely while contending with unprecedented global health, economic, and human rights crises. Nderitu, an accomplished conflict mediator from Kenya with a long record of peacebuilding work across Africa, inherited a position that was confronting earlier institutional challenges further exacerbated by the pandemic.

Interviewees described SAPG Nderitu as “feminist,” “decolonial,” and “coming intuitively from a conflict resolution perspective,” which could be useful for “constructively disrupting traditional UN diplomatic cultures” and “reengaging UN member states that are suspicious of mass atrocity prevention, genocide prevention, and the Responsibility to Protect.” Interviewees also emphasized the “community-based focus” of the office under Nderitu’s leadership. Many of our interviewees told us that under Nderitu’s leadership, national-level community-based civil society organizations working in contentious contexts around the world have found that the OSAPG has had a positive influence on legitimizing their organizations, domestically. For those working in contentious, conflict affected contexts, it seems that the OSAPG spotlighting their work can lessen the risk that their funds are seized and staff harassed, or maybe worse. At the same time, interviewees also expressed frustration that the OSAPG had a pattern of overpromising what it could deliver to community based civil society organizations around the world, and a tendency to take credit for local organizing done by partner organizations (which, we note, is a common complaint amongst local civil society organizations that partner with UN organizations).

On the other hand, interviewees who worked at the UN, international NGOs, or research universities and governments from the Global North, including high level officials from donor states, tended to express specific frustration at being cut out from the OSAPG. This accompanied general frustration with the OSAPG’s focus on conducting programming with community-based organizations at the expense, interviewees said, of engaging with the UN bureaucracy and UN member states. A common theme in our interviews was that the OSAPG was doing programming work that was better suited for NGOs to carry out, while avoiding the more difficult work of advancing genocide and atrocity prevention, and R2P, within the UN bureaucracy and UN system.

Since Nderitu’s appointment, the OSAPG has held workshops with human rights groups and governments, and continued to assist national prevention mechanisms.⁴⁶Secretary-General, “Advancing atrocity prevention: Work of the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect,” 3 May 2021, A/75/863–S/2021/424. In this regard, Nderitu has made important contributions to revitalizing the national committee for genocide prevention in DR Congo.⁴⁷See https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/december-2022/un-special-adviser-prevention-genocide-condemns-escalation-fighting-drc, accessed July 15, 2024. In March 2023, Nderitu was instrumental in establishing Zambia’s National Committee on the Prevention of Genocide, War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, and all Forms of Discrimination.⁴⁸See the Zambian government’s press release on March 24, 2024, titled “Zambia Launches the National Committee on the Prevention of Genocide, War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, and all Forms of Discrimination.” Available from https://www.moj.gov.zm/?p=3766, accessed July 15, 2024.

Nderitu has also issued numerous public statements, more than most prior SAPGs. These include press releases on crisis situations, commemorations of past genocides, general calls for human rights and atrocity prevention, and thematically focused statements on religious tolerance and resisting hate speech.⁴⁹We reviewed and tallied the full set of public statements since 2008 available on the Office website. These include press releases on crisis situations; commemorations of past genocides; general advocacy for human rights, atrocity prevention, and the responsibility to protect; and, especially during Nderitu’s tenure, thematically focused statements on resisting hate speech and religious tolerance. Most of these statements are three pages or shorter, and some are videos. A few statements, such as those to the Human Rights Council, are longer and identify cases of concern. We counted 4 public statements in 2024 (as of March 14); 29 in 2023; 17 in 2022; 10 in 2021; and 7 in 2020. Prior to Nderitu becoming Special Adviser, the office issued fewer than ten a year, with the exceptions of 2015, 2016, and 2018, which were higher. See https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/media-resources/public-statements, accessed March 14, 2024. She has also traveled extensively to deliver talks.

Staff in the Office maintain that it has continued to work on analysis and early warning capacity building. While the Office may still be engaged in these activities, our interviews suggest that the OSAPG has primarily focused on two big themes: engaging with religious leaders, which started during the Office’s support for the Fez Process, and countering hate speech. Thus, our interviewees suggested that while the Office recognizes its role and responsibility in early warning, capacity building, awareness raising, policy development and implementation, and engaging with a variety of relevant stakeholders equally, in practice the Office seems to forefront programming around hate speech and religious leaders.

Nderitu’s hate speech work has included numerous meetings and reports, including general plans of action on sports and hate speech and on empowering women in communities to combat hate speech.⁵⁰It is notable that nearly all the publications listed on the Office’s online publications page concern hate speech. See https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/media-resources/publications, accessed March 8, 2024. The effort to engage with religious leaders has mostly included a series of gatherings and statements concerning religious actors as peacebuilders and co-chairing the UN’s Interagency Task Force on Religion and Sustainable Development’s Multi-Faith Advisory Council (MFAC).⁵¹The Office recently posted to its website a set of older action plans on empowering religious leaders. See https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/programmes, accessed November 14, 2024.

Although this thematic work is relevant for “upstream” atrocity prevention, many interviewees were concerned that a narrow thematic focus marked a retreat from the pressing work of advancing a substantive and broad AP and R2P strategic vision within the UN. Numerous civil society actors said hate speech and engaging religious leaders were “safe topics” for the OSAPG to pursue, at the expense of inherently controversial and politically risky work of advising on atrocity risk situations or strengthening the atrocity prevention and responsibility to protect architecture of the UN, a point also underscored by several UN atrocity prevention experts. A key MFAC participant remarked, moreover, that the religious leaders engaged in the multifaith network are “limited in scope and relevance,” as the network is largely centered in communities from New York and European capitals, with tangential engagement with networks of faith communities around the world.

Numerous interviewees, including those within the UN, stated that the marginalization of the OSAPG has become more pronounced under the current Secretary-General. “We were not seen as important enough to be in key meetings,” said one former Office member. The Office, however, stated that the SAPG attends the SG’s weekly, in-person inter-agency taskforce meetings, although the Office acknowledged that because historically SARPs have not been based in New York, they could not participate regularly.⁵²Our interviews were completed before Mô Bleeker was announced as SARP. Most of the SARPs have not been based in New York because the position did not provide them with a salary, and they needed to seek fulltime employment elsewhere during their appointments. SARPs who were able to draw an external salary in New York were able to base themselves there and attend these important meetings.

In February 2022, Guterres appointed George Okoth-Obbo to replace Smith as SARP. Okoth-Obbo had a long career in the UN, having served as Assistant Secretary-General and head of the High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement, and prior to this in the UNHCR and regional offices for extended periods. Nevertheless, he resigned in August 2023. It is noteworthy that none of the last four SARPs has lasted three years in the position, and Okoth-Obbo’s resignation left the position vacant for nearly seven months, until Mô Bleeker was appointed in March 2024. Bleeker formerly served as Special Envoy for Dealing with the Past and Prevention of Atrocities at the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, and prior to that as a Special Envoy on the Colombian peace process. An expert on atrocity prevention, responsibility to protect, and transitional justice, Bleeker also headed the Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes network.

The OSAPG continues to issue alerts and warnings on high-risk cases, but it is not evident that it has the capacity to conduct sustained and detailed assessments as effectively as some governments or NGOs. As a former Special Adviser noted, today there exist numerous risk assessment and early warning projects that are well staffed and funded, and produce high-quality, publicly available analyses. One high-level UN officer with extensive experience working with the Office noted that the staff is “overstretched,” a point repeated by civil society respondents. The OSAPG has indicated it is updating its 2014 Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes, though interviewees expressed concern that the OSAPG was not engaging with the broader atrocity prevention community. More generally, interviewees consistently noted that connections with key civil society partners have weakened over the past several years. The budget grew between 2021 and the present. The UN appropriated budget reached $2.8 million annually, and donor countries’ “extrabudgetary contributions” reached a peak of $880,000 (2022), then declined to $447,000 (2023) due to “projections of donor support linked to the current global economic situation.”⁵³Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for 2023,” 13 May 2022, A/77/6 (Sect. 3)/Add.2, para. 64. The staff grew to 12 people by 2023, though in previous years several positions remained vacant (mostly notably the SARP).⁵⁴Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for 2023,” 13 May 2022, A/77/6 (Sect. 3)/Add.2, para. 57, Table 8. Some high-level UN officers stated that, by UN standards, this was a generous budget. Others said that the budget was nevertheless insufficient for the ambitious mandate the Office is expected to carry out.

Findings

The OSAPG operates within a complex, dynamic, and unstable global human rights context, but it also faces a host of internal and wider institutional challenges. Here we summarize our findings.

Strengths

1. There is widespread support among international human rights NGOs for a UN office dedicated to atrocity prevention and the responsibility to protect. Many UN member states are also supportive of having a dedicated office on prevention and protection, evident in wide-ranging member state participation in numerous prevention and R2P networks that bring together states, NGOs, and regional inter-governmental organizations (discussed earlier). As one official of an OSAPG donor country noted, “the existence of the Office shows that these issues [atrocity prevention and the responsibility to protect] are important and should be taken seriously by the international community.” In general, then, there is support for such an office in principle.

2. The OSAPG has made numerous statements on various atrocity risk cases over the years, which some NGOs suggest has helped keep those cases in the public light.

3. Apart from high-level atrocity prevention and R2P practitioner spaces in the Global North, the OSAPG enjoys a generally positive reputation as an advocate and ally of local NGOs working in contentious contexts around the world. In interviews with local partners, the report authors found little detailed understanding of the Office’s specific work, beyond the Office’s public-facing programs on combating hate speech and engaging religious leaders. And, local civil society partners did express frustration that the OSAPG often over promises, and that their involvement is often limited to co-sponsoring public-facing workshops and events. However, at the same time, interviewees with familiarity with the OSAPG’s community based civil society partnerships expressed how important this public-facing engagement was to validating their work.

The Dual Mandate and Internal Dynamics

4. The relationship between the dual mandates of atrocity prevention and the responsibility to protect has never been adequately clarified.

a. Beyond the Secretary-General noting “the distinct but complementary nature of the prevention of genocide and the responsibility to protect,”⁵⁵Secretary-General, “Advancing atrocity prevention: Work of the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect,” 3 May 2021, A/75/863–S/2021/424, para. 9. the linkages between the two are unclear. Are they of equal standing, or does one encompass the other? If the latter, how should this look conceptually and programmatically?

b. This ambiguity has created enormous problematic consequences for how the Office operates, creating internal tensions over leadership, program priorities, and the administration of resources.

5. R2P has largely been sidelined since the SARP was established. The SARPs have little institutional support, decision-making authority, budget, staff assistance, or meaningful access to the SG or EOSG. This trend has become more acute over time.

a. The SARP has no permanent presence in New York and no real control over funds. Several former SARPs emphasized the lack of input on budget priorities and the minimal support going to R2P; the current Office insists, however, that while atrocity prevention has always taken a large share of the budget, R2P receives adequate support.

b. The R2P mandate is consistently under attack by a small group of countries (led by Cuba) in the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions and the General Assembly’s Fifth Committee, which deals with budgetary matters.

c. The SARP no longer has sufficient internal administrative support to write annual R2P reports for the SG, which have been partly subcontracted to external consultants. While this is not uncommon in the UN system, as reports are frequently contracted out on a range of issues, the R2P annual reports written by external consultants are descriptive in nature, summarizing programmatic activities and travel, without detailing R2P-specific efforts and their successes and challenges.

6. Numerous former Office members and individuals who have worked closely with the OSAPG highlighted divisive internal Office dynamics, personnel tensions, and high rates of leadership turnover, which are not conducive to workplace wellness or effectiveness.

a. We note the striking pattern of these comments throughout the majority of our interviews.⁵⁶No interviewee disputed these claims, though a minority were unaware of them. We also note that these issues have been present throughout the history of the Office, to various degrees.

b. These dynamics have likely been exacerbated by the peculiar dual-head structure of the Office.

7. The dual mandate and de facto uneven status of Special Advisers has led to staff confusion.

a. Interviewees expressed concern that the Office has become funding-driven rather than mission-driven, which has caused staff to take on various ad hoc programmatic roles outside their defined tasks, though the Office disputes this.

b. The staff are overtasked and lack a strategic vision or process to help them navigate competing requests for their time made by the two Special Advisers.

Analytical Capacity

8. The OSAPG is expected to collect information and conduct systematic atrocity analysis and risk assessment, but it is unable to do so effectively for several reasons:

a. The staff is too small, insufficiently trained as analysts, and too overstretched to produce regular, thorough, and actionable analyses in-house.

b. The analytical capacity of the OSAPG is severely curtailed: the Office is not integrated into core functions of the UN as part of field office presences (e.g., UN country teams) or peace operations. This is so, in part, because the functions that the OSAPG may serve are being undertaken by others that already have a field process (e.g., human rights officers, protection of civilians officers, and Joint Mission Analysis Cells in peacekeeping missions). Regardless, without some form of operational mandate or link, the OSAPG remains sidelined from other offices and organs of the UN that have field presences the OSAPG could draw upon for timely conflict analysis and atrocity assessments.

c. Interviewees overwhelmingly stated the OSAPG has failed to develop sustained working partnerships with recognized high-quality early warning and risk assessment projects housed in universities and NGOs and should consult the services from governments and intergovernmental organizations when appropriate, which could be valuable resources in combination with the UN’s own information sources.
Noting that the OSAPG maintains that it is limited to using only UN information sources, past employees stated that the Office can benefit from the analytical and modeling insights of external experts. The Office also contends it has developed relations with a wide set of national and community-based civil society organizations.

Advising

9. The OSAPG is mandated with advising the SG and UNSC on escalating risks of mass atrocities in the near- and midterm. However:

a. Powerful member states regularly marginalize or ignore the OSAPG.

b. The Executive Office of the Secretary-General sees the OSAPG as symbolically valuable but does not prioritize AP or R2P when it may antagonize powerful member states. This is especially so when AP or R2P would create friction between member states collaborating in areas that have a higher priority for the SG and EOSG.

c. In practice, the SG does not integrate the OSAPG systematically into the analysis of possible atrocity situations nor into the decision-making process for atrocity prevention and response. The Office states that since 2019, it is part of the SG’s Deputy and Executive Committees and the Senior Management Team. Nevertheless, “there is little actual advising happening. The Joint Office is just window dressing” with “little to no influence in EOSG,” one former Special Adviser stated. Another interviewee with firsthand knowledge of these meetings said the OSAPG’s presence in meetings with senior management and decision-making teams is “symbolically important only,” and another interviewee who is highly placed in a government supportive of the Office said it was their government’s perception that the OSAPG is valued merely for “the optics of being able to say the UN cares about genocide prevention.” Multiple Special Advisers expressed frustration over having little access to the important meetings in the Secretariat, and virtually no regular access to the SG on matters relating to AP and R2P, even in situations where they are working closely with the SG on other diplomatic matters. Office staff dispute these points, stating that the Special Advisers attend relevant meetings and contribute analytical insights to those deliberations. This still leaves open the question of whether that substantive input is taken to heart, regardless of whether the SAs are in attendance or not.

d. There is a widespread perception within the UN and in civil society that the OSAPG has retreated from early warning and advising on prevention, which can antagonize member states, to politically uncontroversial issues such as programming on countering hate speech and engaging with religious leaders.

10. The OSAPG is expected to provide politically controversial news to the SG and EOSG about high atrocity risk scenarios that implicate member states. However:

a. In practice, the OSAPG is largely seen as too cautious and deferential to the priorities and preferences of the SG to do this work effectively or meaningfully.

b. The UN organizational structure is resistant to change, characterized by inertia and insufficiently nimble to respond to crises.

c. Some UN member states, such as Russia, China, and Cuba, view AP and R2P as a mechanism for international interference into the domestic politics of member states.

d. There is the perception, across some parts of the UN bureaucracy, that powerful member states may retaliate against statements made by OSAPG by opposing other goals and interests across the UN. Some UN agencies hesitate to work with the OSAPG; they incorrectly see the presence of SAPG in meetings as indicating that genocide is unfolding, or interpret R2P as a stand-in for military intervention, which is seen as complicating conflict mediation efforts and alienating some member states. This is not universal, however; other agencies expressed interest in working with the Office.

System Building: Convening and Mainstreaming AP and R2P

11. The OSAPG is expected to function as a convener of UN agencies engaging with AP and R2P, identify inter-bureaucratic synergies, and support UN-wide efforts to create a coherent prevention and response strategy. Staff in the Office state it is currently involved in all discussions in the UN concerning the three pillars of R2P. However:

a. Interviewees overwhelmingly told us the OSAPG has had difficulty communicating how AP and R2P differ from, and complement, other types of prevention work at the UN, such as on matters relating to peacebuilding, conflict resolution, refugees, displacement, human rights, and economic development.

12. The OSAPG is expected to advance the mainstreaming of prevention and protection across the UN. However:

a. Efforts to mainstream norms across the UN may fail if they involve adopting the relevant language without developing, implementing, and sustaining a coherent and substantive strategic plan of atrocity prevention and responsibility to protect. Although staff stated the Office has an internal strategic plan that is not disseminated, numerous interviewees, including within the UN, said they were unaware of any plan and that this undermines the effectiveness of the Office.

b. Many UN offices are much larger in budget and personnel and command more influence on policy and issue prioritization within the UN.

13. The OSAPG is expected to assist UN member states in AP and R2P capacity-building, including coordinating between relevant UN agencies, external experts, and key national actors. Capacity-building may include, inter alia, support for developing, expanding, or implementing relevant domestic legislation in conformity with existing international laws and norms, and assistance to establish focal points (senior government personnel who ensure government policies are in harmony with AP and R2P). However:

a. These tasks are occasionally in conflict with the OSAPG mandate to advise the SG and EOSG on matters of AP and R2P, which may involve the same member states with whom the Office is working to build capacity. We note this is not unique in the UN system. For example, it parallels the difficult relationships that UN peace operations bridge with host governments, intervening when there are threats to civilians.

Resource Limitations

14. Beyond the lack of support for the SARP, the OSAPG is generally under-resourced. The budget and personnel resources are insufficient to satisfy its dual mandates.

a. This threatens the ability of the OSAPG to successfully execute its mandate.

b. This incentivizes the OSAPG to focus on politically safer programmatic activities for which it can more easily raise funds.

15. In addition to funding allocated through the UN budgetary process, the OSAPG partly relies on individual member state donor funding.

a. Donor funding has been critical to supporting the programmatic and operating needs of the OSAPG.

b. Nevertheless, some donor funding comes with specific use requirements that are narrower than the Office’s primary mandates, which affect programmatic priorities and draw attention away from broader and systematic AP and R2P activities. There is a widespread perception among civil society actors that the OSAPG’s priorities are at least partly donor-driven, though staff in the Office insist otherwise.

c. Individual Special Advisers have been constrained by the lack of regular funding and have had little choice but to pursue programming grants to cover operating costs.

Civil Society Engagement

16. The OSAPG is expected to expand alliances with civil society groups to promote prevention and response norms and efforts globally. The Office says it has done so, and its civil society network now includes many groups working in national contexts on a community basis.⁵⁷The OSAPG website lists a number of organizations assisting in advancing its mandate. See https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/media-resources/partnerships, accessed July 15, 2024.

17. However, many international and local NGOs raised issues around Office’s work.

a. They are frustrated that the OSAPG has let many long-standing civil society relations (especially around R2P) atrophy, although various SARP have sought to remedy this.

b. They are concerned that the OSAPG has tended to over-promise assistance and then failed to deliver meaningful sustained support.

c. They are disappointed in the number of short-term, high-visibility, low-impact collaborations.

Recommendations

Robust UN atrocity prevention and protection requires a systemic approach. This report was tasked with examining the OSAPG specifically, but it is apparent that larger-scale changes in the UN’s approach to prevention and protection are required.

The OSAPG will only be effective if key UN actors work with and support it. The OSAPG cannot be expected to carry the burden of AP and R2P advising and programmatic work in a context where it exercises little influence. The OSAPG was not, and is not, designed to prevent atrocity crimes or implement R2P by itself. Rather, the Office can be considered successful to the extent that it can provide independent, informed, and regular advice to the Secretary-General and the Security Council;⁵⁸Whether the advice is taken into consideration is of course beyond the control of the Office. collect and share information from multiple sources on possible atrocity situations; and coordinate and advance a comprehensive atrocity prevention and responsibility to protect strategy within the UN system.

This final section outlines a set of recommendations based on our findings, directed to a variety of actors: the UN system (including various relevant agencies and offices), the Secretary-General and the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, and the OSAPG. Each of these actors can strengthen atrocity prevention and the responsibility to protect, but they will be most effective if they work together in a coherent fashion. Although many of the recommendations are for the OSAPG, the full list below should be understood as part of an integrated and comprehensive approach. We include specific guidance as well as general recommendations to reinforce a strategic approach to strengthen atrocity prevention and the responsibility to protect.

For the UN System

1. Several initiatives in the UN can serve as opportunities to advance AP and R2P in the organization’s peacebuilding work, including the UN’s 2025 fourth comprehensive peacebuilding architecture review, the Pact for the Future, and the Agenda for Protection.⁵⁹The review is mandated by the 2020 General Assembly (A/RES/75/201) and Security Council (S/RES/2558) resolutions. The review directs the UN to evaluate its entire peacebuilding approach in light of global political changes and update its peacebuilding architecture accordingly. Also see the Pact for the Future (https://www.un.org/en/summit-of-the-future/pact-for-the-future) and the OHCHR’s Agenda for Protection (https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/protection/Agenda-Protection-Pledge-Policy-Brief.pdf). 

a. There is currently no strategic vision or plan for AP and R2P that is widely shared and adopted within the UN, although staff note the Office has an internal strategic plan.

b. The upcoming peacebuilding architecture review, in particular, offers a platform to rethink how the AP and R2P mandates connect to other UN priorities (human rights, humanitarianism, conflict prevention and mediation, peacekeeping, development, etc.).

2. Key UN partners should integrate AP and R2P into their workwhere relevant. Key partners include DPPA, DPO, OCHA, UNHCR, OHCHR, relevant Special Representatives of the Secretary-General, and Human Rights Council investigative bodies (Special Procedures, etc.).

a. Collaborate with the OSAPG in its work as institutional convener on AP and R2P;

b. Identify points of commonality between their own mandates (e.g., humanitarian aid, refugee assistance) and AP and R2P, and how these can connect strategically and programmatically to reinforce one another across the UN system.

c. Identify the OSAPG’s collaborations with other UN entities that are AP and R2P relevant and explore how to strengthen OSAPG involvement to amplify resonance across the UN.

For the Secretary-General and Executive Office of the Secretary-General

3. Publicly endorse atrocity prevention and R2P beyond general, symbolic statements. Without the Secretary-General’s leadership, the OSAPG will remain marginalized.

a. Assert the Office has a distinct mandate to analyze and gather data on AP and R2P from civil society and research institutions, and from the UN’s own internal sources.

b. Assert that the Office has a distinct mandate to advise the SG, EOSG, and UNSC, and that to do so effectively requires collaboration from the wider UN.

c. Support development of an atrocity prevention and R2P lens on prevention work, broadly defined, across the UN system. To achieve this, the coordinating and convening role of the OSAPG must be sustained over time.

4. More meaningfully include both Special Advisers in regular, high-level policy meetings of the EOSG. The Special Adviser for R2P, especially, is functionally disconnected from high-level deliberations over cases within their mandates. The Office should be “well integrated into the Secretariat, with [Office] staff at the table where country situations are discussed,” as one high-level UN official said.

5. Advocate for a salary, budget, and personnel support for the SARP in budget proposals.

6. Direct a comprehensive mapping and review of the atrocity prevention and R2P ecosystem in the UN and in global politics.⁶⁰The UNSG R2P reports have not done this in any detail, though the 2024 report does discuss some actors involved in R2P at the UN. See Secretary-General, “Responsibility to Protect: The Commitment to Prevent and Protect Populations from Atrocity Crimes,” A/78/901-S/2024/434, June 2024.

a. This should not be limited to examining the work of the OSAPG, but rather extend to the whole of the UN system and points of contact with member states and regional nongovernmental organizations (EU, AU, OAS, ASEAN, etc.), and civil society.

b. The review should be led by an independent group of experts, with OSAPG involvement, with the aim of providing concrete recommendations on revamping and reforming prevention and protection policy, institutional responsibilities, implementation mechanisms, and sustained oversight and evaluation processes.

c. The review should include a framework for developing case-specific action plans that can be brought before the Secretary-General, and through the SG to the Security Council.

7. Work with the Special Advisers on guidelines for issuing statements and alerts. Clarify general criteria/guidelines for when a Special Adviser may make public statements of concern, rather than apply ad hoc limitations driven by concerns over UNSC sensibilities, as a number of former Office members have noted.

8. Examine how the structure of the Office impacts workplace and personnel dynamics.

For the Office

Foundational Recommendations

9. Clarify the conceptual, institutional, and programmatic relationship between the AP and R2P mandates. This requires analyzing their conceptual and practical connections.⁶¹Our interviews revealed divergent views on how to correct this, but nearly everyone stated that the current arrangement is “incoherent” and “dysfunctional.” In our view, R2P provides a more comprehensive analytical frame because its three pillars stipulate a set of responsibilities for various domestic and international actors over time. Atrocity prevention is one part of R2P. However, R2P has been increasingly delegitimized, and some experts have proposed using atrocity prevention as a general frame. The Office needs to overcome the artificial distinctions between the two mandates and create a “coherent logic,” in the words of one NGO interviewee, that articulates how the mandates and Special Advisers can complement each other.

This means:

a. Establishing whether atrocity prevention or R2P is the primary overarching concept, or whether they are co-equal concepts;

b. Clarifying the scope of responsibilities and authority between the two Special Advisers. There are several possible options, all of which require deliberation and further scrutiny:

i. Maintain both Special Adviser positions, but strengthen the SARP.

ii. Maintain both Special Advisers, with one working on practical matters (advising, analysis, and implementation) and the other on conceptual matters (strategic framing, norm clarification), using an integrated approach to atrocity prevention and the responsibility to protect.

iii. Have only one Special Adviser, with an integrated AP and R2P portfolio.

10. Share an overarching strategic atrocity prevention framework within the UN that can help guide the UN, regional nongovernmental organizations, and member states for responding comprehensively to high-risk situations, and thus reduce the degree of ad hoc planning. The recently published “Strategies and Priorities” document is a valuable start, and provides the groundwork for developing a framework.⁶²Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, “Strategy and Priorities: 2023-2026,” available at https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/osapg_strategy_and_priorities_2023-2026_.pdf, accessed November 14, 2024.

a. This work should be in conjunction with UN and civil society partners. The UNHCR’s Global Compact on Refugees provides a useful initial template for developing such a framework.

b. A strategic framework is not a substitute for case-specific plans, as each crisis situation has distinct elements and dynamics. Any specific plan must be tailored to fit evolving circumstances. Nevertheless, a general framework can help clarify the resources, leadership, and actors needed for effective prevention.

11. Prioritize the OSAPG’s coordination and convener role on AP and R2P in the UN, especially with agencies and offices that already engage in related work, including DPPA, DPO, OCHA, UNHCR, OHCHR, relevant Special Representatives of the Secretary-General, and Human Rights Council investigative bodies (Special Procedures, etc.). This work may include:

a. Collecting and sharing information and analyses from UN actors that already have deep information channels and analytical capacity (rather than duplicating this work internally).

b. Convening these actors regularly to discuss cases of concern (short or midterm) and facilitate the creation of case-specific action plans.

12. Assist with training key UN personnel to ensure there are nodal points and agents who consider AP and R2P in policy formulation, implementation, and assessment throughout the UN system.

13. Recommit to engaging UN member state delegations to advance AP and R2P, including specific goals like the full ratification of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG).

14. Explore how the developing UN crimes against humanity treaty can inform the work of the Office, including how the Office may function as an advocate for such a treaty, similar to advocating for the ratification of the UNCG.

R2P-Specific Recommendations

15. Conduct a systematic and thorough review of the Office’s work on R2P since the mandate was established. In particular, this should take stock of the challenges involved in moving beyond conceptual debates to programmatic development, which has been lacking.⁶³Rebecca Barber, “A Proposal for Advancing Implementation of the Responsibility to Protect,” Global Responsibility to Protect 15 (2023): 361-391.

16. Insist the EOSG provide the SARP with a salary, and budgetary and personnel resources at UN headquarters to pursue its mandate.

17. Develop and disseminate a coherent R2P implementation plan within the UN, including the delineation of investigation, review, and oversight mechanisms, that draws on and brings together relevant UN actors. Civil society partners and networks like the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Group of Friends of the Responsibility to Protect, and others have much to contribute to developing an implementation plan. It should focus on the practical steps of implementation, rather than conceptual development.

Programmatic Reform Recommendations

18. Advance UN atrocity prevention action plans for particular cases.

a. A case-specific action plan should include several components:

• An updated framework of analysis;
• Processes of investigation and information collection;
• Identifying and including key UN partners;
• Policy response recommendations;
• Mechanisms for monitoring UN efforts on a given case over time;
• Regular evaluations tied to recommendations for improvement; and
• A sustained plan of engagement over time with others within the UN.

b. The aim should be to develop case-specific action plans that can be brought before the Secretary-General, and through the SG to the Security Council. Therefore, such case-specific action plans should develop and include mechanisms for regular follow-up, rather than episodic or one-off advising.

i. Such mechanisms would require member state support. We therefore recommend that the Special Advisers collaboratively work with member states to develop support for follow-up mechanisms.

ii. Various other UN initiatives have successfully developed these processes and procedures, such as Children and Armed Conflict; Women, Peace, and Security; and Sustainable Development. We encourage the Special Advisers to look to these models for articulating follow-up reporting mechanisms on case-specific action plans.

19. Produce annual responsibility to protect reports that cover R2P trends, the status of prior recommendations, and current implementation efforts, for which there is significant interest among member states.⁶⁴The 2024 UNSG report on R2P provides little systematic analysis of R2P implementation and no concrete recommendations for strengthening implementation and monitoring. Instead, it is offers generalized observations on the importance of R2P. Secretary-General, “Responsibility to Protect: The Commitment to Prevent and Protect Populations from Atrocity Crimes,” A/78/901-S/2024/434, June 2024. The OSAPG’s “Compendium of Practice: Implementation of the Responsibility to Protect,” recently posted to its website, provides a more detailed account of the status of R2P up to 2016. See: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/RtoP%20Compendium%20of%20Practice%20(Provisional%20Pre-Publication%20Version)%20FINAL%2020%20March%202017.pdf, accessed November 14, 2024. This could complement existing reports, which have often been thematic in focus.

a. Recommendation 10 above envisions mechanisms for regular follow-up on case-specific action plans. Annual reports have different goals and aims – reporting back to the General Assembly on important trends, developments, successes, and challenges to the responsibility to protect.

20. Produce annual atrocity prevention reports that cover prevention trends, the status of prior recommendations, and current implementation efforts, for which there is also significant interest among member states.

a. This should go beyond summary statements in SG reports for purposes of funding and include a review of the status of prior recommendations and implementation.

21. If the Office intends to update the Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes, the revision should draw on recent advances in early warning research (e.g., including gender-based attacks as an indicator), and should be done in consultation with a broad range of NGOs and civil society actors with expertise in this area, not a narrow set of consultants.

a. The Office should consider developing a companion reference document that connects analysis with generating a prevention plan and strategy. The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect’s Manual for R2P Focal Points is an example of how to do this.⁶⁵The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Manual for R2P Focal Points (New York: Global Network of R2P Focal Points, n.d.), available from http://www.globalr2p.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Updated-Annexes-R2P-Focal-Points-Manual.pdf.

22. Systematically incorporate countering hate speech and engagement with religious leaders into broader atrocity prevention and responsibility to protect strategies, rather than treat them as free-standing thematic focus areas, as is largely done at present. Hate speech is one risk indicator and enabler of atrocities, and thus should be nested within broader prevention strategies and architecture. Likewise, engaging religious leaders is important, but it should be part of a wider atrocity prevention strategic framework.

23. Recommit to strengthening relationships with key civil society actors. The Office’s relationships with these organizations have declined. Many organizations have deep regional and global expertise and can both contribute to and benefit from the work of the Office. The Office can play a significant role as convener of regular meetings between civil society organizations and relevant UN actors.

24. Play a more forceful role explicitly calling out states and nonstate actors committing or likely to commit grave human rights violations. This should be part of sustained and vocal campaigns – not only occasional statements – and can be done without violating the mandate prohibition on legally designating that a genocide is occurring.

About the Authors

Douglas Irvin-Erickson is Assistant Professor & Director of the Genocide Prevention Program at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. He can be reached at his website douglasirvinerickson.org

Ernesto Verdeja is Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame. @ErnestoVerdeja and @ernestoverdeja.bsky.social, and everdeja.weebly.com.

Notes

• 1
  We use the abbreviation OSAPG because it is currently used by the Office in official documents. In other publications, and in previous years, the Office has been referred to as the “Joint Office,” “OSAPGR2P,” or other abbreviations more inclusive of the “R2P” side of the joint mandate.
• 2
  See Rebecca Barber, “The UN Should Increase Support for the Responsibility to Protect,” Just Security, August 17, 2023, available from https://www.justsecurity.org/87571/the-un-should-increase-support-for-the-responsibility-to-protect/; Lawrence Woocher, “Developing a Strategy, Methods and Tools for Genocide Early Warning,” Center for International Conflict Resolution, Columbia University, 2006, available from https://www.un.org/ar/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/Woocher%20Early%20warning%20report,%202006-11-10.pdf; also see the sources cited below in this report.
• 3
  We thank our interviewees and the participants of the Atrocity Prevention Study Group for their insights, and James Finkel, Lisa Sharland, Juliet Weis, and the Stimson Center for the opportunity to work on this project. We also thank Marko Gural, Khya Morton, and Anka Whelan for their research assistance, and the research staff at the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library who facilitated access to key UN documents and databases.
• 4
  On the problematic mandate of the OSAPG, see William Schabas, “The Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and His Inscrutable Mandate,” in Rule of Law through Human Rights and International Criminal Justice: Essays in Honour of Adama Dieng, ed. Charles Riziki Majinge, 65-81 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015); Stephen McLoughlin, Jess Gifkins, and Alex J. Bellamy, “The Evolution of Mass Atrocity Early Warning in the UN Secretariat: Fit for Purpose?”, International Peacekeeping 30, no. 4 (2023): 477-505.
• 5
  Staff from the Office agreed to respond to a set of written questions from the authors in November 2023. However, despite subsequent inquiries from November 2023 to April 2024, the authors did not receive a response. Upon receipt of a prepublication courtesy copy of the final draft report from the Stimson Center to the Office in July 2024, OSAPG staff provided comments in July and again in October. Those responses have been reflected in the analysis of this report.
• 6
  Most interviews lasted an hour. In several cases, we had subsequent interviews. Nearly all interviewees requested full confidentiality in order to speak frankly. Thus, we opted not to name anyone in the report. Some interviewees preferred to write extensive comments to us, especially those who needed to clear their answers with their employers. Others were prohibited from sharing written answers but were permitted to speak with us.
• 7
  Secretary-General, “Letter to the President of the Security Council,” S/2004/567, 13 July 2004.
• 8
  See Aidan Hehir, “An Analysis of Perspectives on the Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 5, no. 3 (2010): 258-276; and see Deborah Mayersen, “Current and Potential Capacity for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities within the United Nations System,” Global Responsibility to Protect 3, no. 2 (2011): 197-222.
• 9
  Interviewees have particular perspectives based on the time period, nature, and extent of their interactions with the OSAPG. We were keen to identify similar observations made by multiple interview subjects and draw on multiple sources to determine what may explain discrepancies in perspectives. Nevertheless, we underscore the remarkable consistency of views among our interlocutors – particularly those who have had extensive experience with the OSAPG over time – which provides substantial confidence that our observations and assessments are based on reliable information. Interviewees showed little variation in their evaluations of the Office; the differences arose over what should be done moving forward.
• 10
  Secretary-General, “Letter to the President of the Security Council,” S/2004/567, 13 July 2004.
• 11
  General Assembly, Resolution A/Res/60/1, 24 October 2005, para. 138-140; Secretary-General, “Implementing the responsibility to protect,” A/63/677, 12 January 2009.
• 12
  James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Kerry Whigham, “From Holocaust Studies to Atrocity Prevention: Genocide Studies and the Growth of Transdisciplinary Activist Scholarship,” Social Research 90, no. 4 (2023): 809-836; Ernesto Verdeja, “Critical Genocide Studies and Mass Atrocity Prevention,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 13, no. 3 (2019): 111-127.
• 13
  Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, “Responsibility to Protect Background Briefing,” n.d., accessed March 15, 2024, https://www.globalr2p.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/R2P-Backgrounder-Updated-January-2021.pdf. The UN refers to R2P as a principle, but many organizations call it a norm.
• 14
  Karen Smith, “R2P at the UN: The Problem of Selective History and Incomplete Narratives,” Global Responsibility to Protect 14, no. 3 (2022): 273-276; Alexander Bellamy and Edward Luck, The Responsibility to Protect: From Promise to Practice (London: Polity Press, 2018); Ramesh Thakur and Thomas Weiss, “R2P: From Idea to Norm – and Action?”, Global Responsibility to Protect 1, no. 1 (2009): 22-53.
• 15
  Cecelia Jacob, “If Mass Atrocity Prevention Has a Future, the Responsibility to Protect Can’t Afford to Be Niche,” Just Security, November 14, 2023, available from https://www.justsecurity.org/90031/if-mass-atrocity-prevention-has-a-future-the-responsibility-to-protect-cant-afford-to-be-niche/; Simon Adams, Mass Atrocities, the Responsibility to Protect and the Future of Human Rights (New York: Routledge, 2021); Alexander Bellamy, “The Discomforts of Politics: What Future for Atrocity Prevention?”, Just Security, October 31, 2023, available from https://www.justsecurity.org/89832/the-discomforts-of-politics-what-future-for-atrocity-prevention/.
• 16
  Jennifer Traham, Existing Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). But also see Jennifer Welsh, “The Security Council’s Role in Fulfilling the Responsibility to Protect,” Ethics and International Affairs 35, no. 2 (2021): 227-243.
• 17
  Federica D’Alessandra and Gwendolyn Whidden, “Whither Atrocity Prevention at the UN? Look Beyond R2P and the Security Council,” Stimson Center, November 6, 2023, available from https://www.stimson.org/2023/whither-atrocity-prevention-at-the-un-look-beyond-r2p-and-the-security-council/.
• 18
  Secretary-General, “Report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of the Five Point Action Plan and the activities of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide,” A/HRC/7/37, Human Rights Council, 2008.
• 19
  Stephen McLoughlin, Jess Gifkins, and Alexander Bellamy, “The Evolution of Mass Atrocity Early Warning in the UN Secretariat: Fit for Purpose?”, International Peacekeeping 30, no. 4 (2023): 477-483.
• 20
  Secretary-General, “Letter to the President of the Security Council,” S/2004/567, 13 July 2004.
• 21
  General Assembly, Resolution A/Res/60/1, 24 October 2005.
• 22
  Secretary-General, “Report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of the Five Point Action Plan and the activities of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide,” E/CN.4/2006/84, Commission on Human Rights, 9 March 2006.
• 23
  Francis Deng, Sadikiel Kimaro, Terrence Lyons, Donald Rothschild, and I. William Zartman, Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1996).
• 24
  Secretary-General, “Report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of the Five Point Action Plan and the activities of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide,” A/HRC/7/37, Human Rights Council, 2008.
• 25
  See General Assembly, Resolution A/Res/60/1, 24 October 2005, para. 138-140; on the elaboration of the three pillars, see Secretary-General, “Implementing the responsibility to protect,” A/63/677, 12 January 2009.
• 26
  See the following: Francis Deng, “From ‘Sovereignty as Responsibility’ to the ‘Responsibility to Protect’,” Global Responsibility to Protect 2, no. 4 (2010): 353-370; Ekkehard Strauss, “Institutional Capacities of the United Nations to Prevent and Halt Atrocity Crimes,” in The Responsibility to Prevent: Overcoming the Challenges of Atrocity Prevention, ed. Jennifer Mary Welsh and Serena K. Sharma, 38-82 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Ekkehard Strauss, “A Short Story of a Long Effort: The United Nations and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities,” in Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention, ed. Alex Zucker, Sheri P. Rosenberg, and Tibi Galis, 428-450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
• 27
  We examined every available budget document since 2004 concerning the SAs and the Office, but comparisons over time are difficult to make for several reasons: the budget categories and format change over time (typically in the Secretary-General’s funding requests); the Office has not always spent the amount appropriated (sometimes more, sometimes less); the exact breakdown and purpose of donor state contributions is not available for every year; and some budget proposals are biennial and others are annual. Nevertheless, the “proposed programme budget” documents include information on prior year budgets, which are the sources for our numbers. Additionally, the reported staff size does not always include interns nor people seconded to the Office from elsewhere in the UN, who may work part-time or not complete a full year.
• 28
  Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2012-2013,” 12 September 2011, A/66/354/Add.1, para. 89-95; Secretary-General, “Programme budget for the biennium 2012-2013,” 5 September 2012, A/67/346/Add.1, para. 80-87. This did not include an “extrabudgetary contribution” of about $690,000 in 2012, para 85.
• 29
  See Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2012-2013,” 12 September 2011, A/66/354/Add.1; Secretary-General, “Programme budget for the biennium 2012-2013,” 5 September 2012, A/67/346/Add.1.
• 30
  See Samantha Capicotto and Scharf, Rob, “National Mechanisms for the Prevention of Atrocity Crimes,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 11, no. 3 (2018): 6-19.
• 31
  Liberata Mulamula and Ashad Sentongo, “An African regional perspective on prevention Experiences from the Great Lakes Region,” in Preventing Mass Atrocities: Policies and Practices, ed. Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr, (London: Routledge, 2018), 144-155; Ashley L. Greene and Ashad Sentongo, “Assessing National Mechanisms for Atrocity Prevention in Africa’s Great Lakes Region,” Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 14, no. 2 (2019): 193–205.
• 32
  The Office is mandated with pooling information from various sources within the UN for purposes of analysis and advising. The existing documentation on the quality and breadth of sources is difficult to evaluate, a point echoed by various UN officials whom we interviewed; for instance, the Office reports that in 2013 it drew on 175 “consistent and reliable sources of information, primarily from within the United Nations system, collected on a daily basis.” The estimate for 2014 was 200 sources, and the target for 2015 was 225. It is not clear what to make of these metrics, which in any case have changed over time, and currently no comparable metrics are available. See Secretary-General, “Programme budget for the biennium 2014-2015,” 3 September 2014, A/69/363/Add.1, Table 8/c.
• 33
  Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2014-2015,” A/68/327/Add.1, para. 65-67.  For a sense of what this work entailed, see Ashad Sentongo, “The Practical Use of Early Warning and Response in Preventing Mass Atrocities and Genocide: Experiences from the Great Lakes Region,” in Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention, ed. Alex Zucker, Sheri P. Rosenberg, and Tibi Galis, 450-476 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). And see Anslem Wongibeh Adunimay, Creating Peace and Security: The Contribution of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (master’s diss., University of Johannesburg, South Africa, 2017).
• 34
  Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes: A Tool for Prevention (2014).
• 35
  Adama Dieng and Jennifer Welsh, “Assessing the Risk of Atrocities,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 9, no. 3 (2016): 1-12.
• 36
  Secretary-General, “Programme budget for the biennium 2014-2015,” 3 September 2014, A/69/363/Add.1, paras. 59-63. On the Latin American Network for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, see https://www.auschwitzinstitute.org/programs/latin-american-network-for-genocide-and-mass-atrocity-prevention.
• 37
  Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, “Plan of Action for Religious Leaders and Actors to Prevent Incitement to Violence that Could Lead to Atrocity Crimes,” New York, 2017, available from https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/publications-and-resources/Plan_of_Action_Religious-rev5.pdf.
• 38
  The idea for the Office to engage religious leaders has been a long-term initiative, stemming from a commitment to include the voices of leaders from all faiths in atrocity prevention.
• 39
  For more, see Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, “Plan of Action for Religious Leaders and Actors to Prevent Incitement to Violence that Could Lead to Atrocity Crimes,” New York, 2017, 9, available from https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/publications-and-resources/Plan_of_Action_Religious-rev5.pdf; Secretary-General, “Remarks on the Launch of the Fez Plan of Action,” New York, 14 July 2017, available from https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2017-07-14/secretary-generals-remarks-the-launch-of-the-fez-plan-of-action-delivered.
• 40
  See https://media.un.org/unifeed/en/asset/d162/d1626206, accessed July 15, 2024. And See Ferdinand Mbirigi, “Assurance for Implementing the State’s Responsibility to Protect: Lessons from Burundian Practice,” Global Responsibility to Protect 15, no. 1 (2022): 30-47.
• 41
  The R2P reports are available here: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/key-documents.shtml.
• 42
  Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2018-2019,” 30 August 2017, A/72/371/Add.1, para. 41.
• 43
  Karen Smith, “Women and Atrocity Prevention,” Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes, 28 October 2020, available at https://gaamac.org/2020/10/women-and-atrocity-prevention/.
• 44
  Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2014-2015,” 23 August 2013, A/68/327/Add.1; Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2014-2015,” 3 September 2014 A/69/363/Add.1; Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2016-2017,” 3 September 2015, A/70/348/Add.1; Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2016-2017,” 6 September 2016, A/71/365/Add.1; Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for the biennium 2018-2019,” 30 August 2017, A/72/371/Add.1; Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, “Third report on the proposed programme budget for 2020,” 25 September 2019, A/74/7/Add.2; Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, “Fourth report on the proposed programme budget for 2021,”  27 October 2020, A/75/7/Add.3.
• 45
  See United Nations “Note to Correspondents: UN High-level Officials Express Deep Concern Over Escalating Ethnic Tensions in Ethiopia,” 12 November 2020, available from https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/note-correspondents/2020-11-12/note-correspondents-un-high-level-officials-express-deep-concern-over-escalating-ethnic-tensions-ethiopia.
• 46
  Secretary-General, “Advancing atrocity prevention: Work of the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect,” 3 May 2021, A/75/863–S/2021/424.
• 47
  See https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/december-2022/un-special-adviser-prevention-genocide-condemns-escalation-fighting-drc, accessed July 15, 2024.
• 48
  See the Zambian government’s press release on March 24, 2024, titled “Zambia Launches the National Committee on the Prevention of Genocide, War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, and all Forms of Discrimination.” Available from https://www.moj.gov.zm/?p=3766, accessed July 15, 2024.
• 49
  We reviewed and tallied the full set of public statements since 2008 available on the Office website. These include press releases on crisis situations; commemorations of past genocides; general advocacy for human rights, atrocity prevention, and the responsibility to protect; and, especially during Nderitu’s tenure, thematically focused statements on resisting hate speech and religious tolerance. Most of these statements are three pages or shorter, and some are videos. A few statements, such as those to the Human Rights Council, are longer and identify cases of concern. We counted 4 public statements in 2024 (as of March 14); 29 in 2023; 17 in 2022; 10 in 2021; and 7 in 2020. Prior to Nderitu becoming Special Adviser, the office issued fewer than ten a year, with the exceptions of 2015, 2016, and 2018, which were higher. See https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/media-resources/public-statements, accessed March 14, 2024.
• 50
  It is notable that nearly all the publications listed on the Office’s online publications page concern hate speech. See https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/media-resources/publications, accessed March 8, 2024.
• 51
  The Office recently posted to its website a set of older action plans on empowering religious leaders. See https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/programmes, accessed November 14, 2024.
• 52
  Our interviews were completed before Mô Bleeker was announced as SARP. Most of the SARPs have not been based in New York because the position did not provide them with a salary, and they needed to seek fulltime employment elsewhere during their appointments. SARPs who were able to draw an external salary in New York were able to base themselves there and attend these important meetings.
• 53
  Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for 2023,” 13 May 2022, A/77/6 (Sect. 3)/Add.2, para. 64.
• 54
  Secretary-General, “Proposed programme budget for 2023,” 13 May 2022, A/77/6 (Sect. 3)/Add.2, para. 57, Table 8.
• 55
  Secretary-General, “Advancing atrocity prevention: Work of the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect,” 3 May 2021, A/75/863–S/2021/424, para. 9.
• 56
  No interviewee disputed these claims, though a minority were unaware of them.
• 57
  The OSAPG website lists a number of organizations assisting in advancing its mandate. See https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/media-resources/partnerships, accessed July 15, 2024.
• 58
  Whether the advice is taken into consideration is of course beyond the control of the Office.
• 59
  The review is mandated by the 2020 General Assembly (A/RES/75/201) and Security Council (S/RES/2558) resolutions. The review directs the UN to evaluate its entire peacebuilding approach in light of global political changes and update its peacebuilding architecture accordingly. Also see the Pact for the Future (https://www.un.org/en/summit-of-the-future/pact-for-the-future) and the OHCHR’s Agenda for Protection (https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/protection/Agenda-Protection-Pledge-Policy-Brief.pdf). 
• 60
  The UNSG R2P reports have not done this in any detail, though the 2024 report does discuss some actors involved in R2P at the UN. See Secretary-General, “Responsibility to Protect: The Commitment to Prevent and Protect Populations from Atrocity Crimes,” A/78/901-S/2024/434, June 2024.
• 61
  Our interviews revealed divergent views on how to correct this, but nearly everyone stated that the current arrangement is “incoherent” and “dysfunctional.” In our view, R2P provides a more comprehensive analytical frame because its three pillars stipulate a set of responsibilities for various domestic and international actors over time. Atrocity prevention is one part of R2P. However, R2P has been increasingly delegitimized, and some experts have proposed using atrocity prevention as a general frame.
• 62
  Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, “Strategy and Priorities: 2023-2026,” available at https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/osapg_strategy_and_priorities_2023-2026_.pdf, accessed November 14, 2024.
• 63
  Rebecca Barber, “A Proposal for Advancing Implementation of the Responsibility to Protect,” Global Responsibility to Protect 15 (2023): 361-391.
• 64
  The 2024 UNSG report on R2P provides little systematic analysis of R2P implementation and no concrete recommendations for strengthening implementation and monitoring. Instead, it is offers generalized observations on the importance of R2P. Secretary-General, “Responsibility to Protect: The Commitment to Prevent and Protect Populations from Atrocity Crimes,” A/78/901-S/2024/434, June 2024. The OSAPG’s “Compendium of Practice: Implementation of the Responsibility to Protect,” recently posted to its website, provides a more detailed account of the status of R2P up to 2016. See: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/RtoP%20Compendium%20of%20Practice%20(Provisional%20Pre-Publication%20Version)%20FINAL%2020%20March%202017.pdf, accessed November 14, 2024.
• 65
  The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Manual for R2P Focal Points (New York: Global Network of R2P Focal Points, n.d.), available from http://www.globalr2p.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Updated-Annexes-R2P-Focal-Points-Manual.pdf.