International Affinity and the Prevention of Genocide

In: Global responsibility to protect: GR2P, Band 6, Heft 4, S. 453-482

Abstract

The question of the absence of genocides where they might have been expected is an important one; answering this question successfully can help establish the empirical validity or instead, disconfirmation, of proposed explanations for genocide's occurrence. Affinity of populations or governments (ethnoreligiously similar or ideologically sympathetic) with the power and influence to actively intervene or to provoke intervention on behalf of the victims is understood to be a major genocide preventive. Cases examined include a contrast between Greek survival and genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the absence of the genocide of Jews in Poland at the time of the Partitions, absence of genocide of the Irish Catholics by the British after the First World War, and a contrast between the absence of the Holocaust in the early stages of the Nazi occupation of Europe, but its presence upon the German invasion of Russia in 1941. Protection of threatened populations in peacetime but their extreme vulnerability in time of war is a paradox of the affinity condition. Implications of affinity for R2P are developed in the international propagation of the R2P norm and the deft use of the diplomacy in the service of protecting threatened populations.