ABSTRACT
The past two decades have seen considerable progress in Washington’s ability to identify situations that threaten to escalate into mass atrocities and its theoretical understanding of how to respond to these situations, but considerable work remains. The United States has various tools at its disposal – diplomatic, security, economic, and judicial, to name just a few – to help societies manage conflict without resorting to collective violence and deter those who would use violence to secure their interests. Until recently, the departments and agencies responsible for deciding how to use these tools frequently failed to do so in close coordination with one another, and coordinated even more rarely for the purpose of preventing atrocities in at-risk countries. The Obama Administration, through efforts like President Obama’s Atrocity Prevention Board (APB), worked to develop a more consistent government-wide and multilateral approach to preventing and stopping mass atrocities, and to draw up a menu of prevention tools and approaches to apply as individual situations warranted. Those who follow prevention issues closely are anxious to see whether the Trump Administration will continue those advances, cast them aside, or develop a completely different approach.
