Never Again? Mass Atrocity Early Warning Practices in the UN Secretariat

Abstract The UN Secretariat considerably increased its institutional and analytical early warning capacities after the Rwandan genocide. Yet, despite this professed commitment and prioritization, a development also supported by the emphasis on prevention in the agreement on the responsibility to protect, the UN Secretariat’s early warning work encounters frequent challenges when it comes to communicating and promoting action. To make sense of this, we examine the early warning system in the UN Secretariat at the level of practices performed by actors within the UN machinery across the three stages of information gathering, analysis, and communication. Early warning experts are dispersed throughout different UN departments, with a hub in the Joint Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. We argue that early warning practitioners at the UN belong to diverse communities of practice (CoPs), drawing on international practice theories. This manifests in distinct and diverging standards of assessing “competent” practices, the potential for tensions, and therefore, resulting in performance gaps. Theoretically, by applying CoP theory to the UN context and expanding what can be understood by CoP thinking, these arguments advance the field of CoP scholarship by examining the impact of intersecting CoPs and how professional backgrounds and socializations play a significant role in determining what constitutes a CoP and its associated standards of competence. Empirically, we provide a novel analysis of persisting UN performance gaps in this crucial area based on seventeen in-depth interviews with early warning practitioners.