Will to Intervene: One Year Later

It's been a big year for Concordia's Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. Since releas­ing Mobilizing the Will to Intervene, the groundbreaking genocide and mass atrocities prevention report, last fall, the MIGS name has reverberated around North America and the world; echoes of which Director Frank Chalk and Lead Researcher Kyle Matthews heard during their early August trip to South Africa.

Meeting with numerous senior South African government and UN officials to enter phase two of W2I, the pair were buoyed by the eagerness of policy makers in a nation with an already notable reputation for leader­ship of the cause.

"This country is pivotal in prevent­ing mass atrocities in Africa," says Matthews. "The timing is perfect."

This embryonic second major phase is being built upon a foundation laid over the past 12 months; one that gathered input from more than 80 senior decision-makers and academ­ics with first-hand experience of mass atrocities and distilled it into recom­mendations for the Canadian and U.S. governments to take leadership in re­sponding to and preventing genocide and mass atrocities.

As the MIGS people will tell you, it's been a big year.

It began on Sept. 21, 2009, in Wash­ington, D.C. at the U.S. Institute of Peace, when Chalk, Matthews and MIGS Senior Fellow Senator and LGen Roméo Dallaire (ret) presented the re­port's recommendations for American policy-makers. The following day, they laid out their recommendations at the National Press Gallery in Ottawa for the Canadian government.

Nine days later, on Oct. 1 at a panel discussion on Parliament Hill, MIGS made the case to Members of Parlia­ment and Senators that genocide and mass atrocity prevention should be prioritized as a national interest.

Since then, they've garnered wide­spread media coverage, received writ­ten endorsements from the Liberal and New Democratic parties of Can­ada, as well as the student-led anti-genocide group STAND, the Canadian Federation of University Women, and have been approached by many NGOs keen on working together.

And while the Canadian govern­ment has yet to formally implement any of W2I's recommendations, MIGS has prompted changes to U.S. policy.

The Obama administration has ap­plied two recommendations that will have profound effects on genocide prevention (see timeline below).

"These are significant accomplish­ments on the way to major break­throughs in building America's will and capacity to prevent genocide," says Chalk. "We're hoping for parallel accomplishments in Canada."

This fall, McGill-Queen's Univer­sity Press published the book version of the report (co-authored by Chalk, Dallaire, Matthews, and researchers Simon Doyle and Carla Barqueiro), designed as a textbook for high school and university students. While the re­port is already used at U of T's Munk Centre for Global affairs, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Ot­tawa, MIGS hopes the book (available now in Concordia bookstores and on Amazon.ca) will become the standard text for individuals studying genocide prevention.

Chalk will also integrate the text into his curriculum. Then, the class will participate in a Civic Dialogue (see Civic Dialogue below).

"South Africa came out of apart­heid-era peacefully, it's the most pow­erful country militarily, diplomatically and economically in the region, and a major supporter of the Responsibility to Protect principles," says Matthews about the W2I project's new direction. "It's a logical focus for us now."

Chalk, who just received an invi­tation from the U.N. Office of the Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, will be flying to Kampala, Uganda to deliver workshops this month on the history and early warn­ing signs of genocide, and prevention.

Matthews will be going back to South Africa in late-October for sec­ondary meetings and a presentation at the Unversity of Pretoria to discuss "...what can be done domestically to improve the country's ability to pre­vent atrocities abroad."

And over the course of the next year, the W2I team will venturing back to the region to work with South African partners for the next report - one that is of particular relevancy for former U.N. Force Commander Dallaire. "Ro­méo Dallaire has a remarkable reputa­tion in both Africa and across Canada and the U.S.," says Chalk. "He's invalu­able to this cause."

"The ideas and the momentum that have come out of this project are hav­ing real life applicability," says Mat­thews. "We've created something dy­namic and the wheels are rolling."

Civic Dialogue

Beyond federal politicians and policy makers, MIGS is reaching out to the cities where we live. The CIVIC DIALOGUE component of the project is facilitating discussion amongst municipal government councils and public intellectuals in major North American cities.

In collaboration with The Simons Foundation, the MIGS team brought together on Nov. 27 at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver 40 former and current politicians from the Vancouver municipal and B.C. provincial governments, business people, academics, and NGO leaders to brainstorm about the report's recommendations to the Government of Canada.

The result was a collaborative resolution submitted to the City of Vancouver in hopes its municipal council would urge the federal government to take action. While Vancouver has not yet passed the resolution, MIGS continues to press for its support.

They've since held talks in Calgary in January and Edmonton in February, and hope to hold the next dialogue here in Montreal. They've also begun talks to host dialogues in key U.S. cities, looking to Chicago to be the first.

"It's a ground-up approach," says Matthews. "We're in a new era where humanitarian crises in far away places affect municipal security and politics right here in Canada," he says, pointing to the 2008 conflict between the Sri Lankan government and Tamil Tigers that led to the blocking of Toronto's Gardiner Expressway by Canadian Tamils in protest. "While foreign policy is not within their jurisdiction, it's well within their interest to engage and urge those responsible at the federal level to take this issue more seriously."