“Paved with Good Intentions”: Attempts to Design Mechanisms to Prevent Genocide in the Twenty-First Century and Why They Have Not Succeeded

As the twenty-first century rolls on, it is important to re-examine the attempts to prevent genocide. From the Armenian Genocide, through the Holocaust to the Cambodian Genocide and all the way to the Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Darfur, lessons concerning prevention have been learned and are quite clear. This chapter sets out to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, and relative effectiveness of the in light of the continued atrocities perpetrated thus far in this century. All the former colonies previously held together by threat or force of Soviet intervention suddenly desired to invoke their sovereignty and to create new ethnic, religious, or some other-based nation-state. The Genocide Prevention Task Force is largely a product of the US government and might be viewed as an attempt to recover from some of the embarrassment stemming from the lack of action on the part of the United States to do anything about preventing or halting the atrocities perpetrated in the 1990s.