Prevention

The goal of prevention has had a central role in the study of genocide ever since Raphael Lemkin coined the term.  Some early scholarship addressed the Holocaust as a failure of prevention – i.e., asking how it was that the international system allowed it to happen.  After the Holocaust, the advent of the genocide convention (formally titled “Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”) seemed to put in place a regime of “Never Again.”  Late-twentieth century genocides put to rest the notion that such a regime was self-actualizing.  As Samantha Power pointed out i