Africa, paving the way: Lessons from African actors pushing forward the international community’s role and responsibility in addressing genocide

Currently, international collective security and peace institutions are weathering a deep crisis in legitimacy for their systematic inability to protect populations from devastating genocides such as those ongoing Palestine, Sudan and the DRC. This essay examines whether lessons can be extracted from the attitudes of a continent that has historically struggled with high rates of mass atrocity crime, and has thus been driven to innovate in the field of international response. I find that, in expanding the power and the responsibility of the international community to intervene in protection of targeted peoples, African actors have been seminal in promoting a higher international normative standard of non-indifference towards atrocity. I look at three different dimensions of international activity to argue this: in a first part, I showcase the African Union’s innovative regional governance framework for identifying risks of mass atrocity and its unique sanctioning of unilateral military intervention in such instances. In a second part, I look at developments in international law concerning mass atrocity driven by African actors, such as their incubation of a regional criminal justice court to address transnational mass atrocity crime, their role in the genesis of the ICC, and finally the activism of both South Africa and The Gambia in expanding the scope of State responsibility before the ICJ. In a final part, I survey the African bloc’s diplomatic posture in the global political arena and show that together they have consistently advocated for larger responsibility of the international community towards victims of genocide. This has been made especially clear recently in light of African attitudes towards the ongoing Palestinian genocide. I conclude that, despite the persistence of regional challenges, legal and political innovation emanating from the African continent in the area constitutes a ripe field of inspiration in modelling better international protection of targets of mass atrocity.