Are International Protocols Working? A Historical Perspective on Mass Casualty Conflicts
For the first time in history, we have the luxury–or burden–to witness what is happening around the world. We can turn on the news or sift through social media and see the forecasted weather just as easily as the bombing of cities halfway around the world. Never before have humans been so exposed to what crimes are being committed and how little is being done to change their trajectory. Historically, we have learned to implement protocols to prevent tragedies from repeating themselves, but we have not always been successful at maintaining those frameworks. International statutes and conventions have been established to prevent tragedies from repeating, but they are not always effective. But how does the availability of information about mass crimes contribute to the intervention of international actors?
In Rwanda, 800,000 people were killed in just 100 days in 1994. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, 100,000 people were murdered between 1992-5 with the intent to ethnically cleanse the region. Today, 67,075 Palestinians have been killed and 169,430 injured since October 7, 2023 in response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on that tragic day. These three examples, while vastly different, are some of the most horrific, large-scale acts of violence in modern history. The term ‘genocide’ was introduced by a Polish lawyer, Raphäel Lemkin, in 1944 following the devastation of the Holocaust. Since then, similar acts of mass murder targeting national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups have occurred on too many occasions.
In 1948, the UN General Assembly passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to recognise genocide as an international crime. As of 2022, this convention has been ratified by 153 states and is a widely accepted norm in international law. The countries that recognise the Genocide Convention have a duty to create conditions which prevent these crimes from taking place. Why, then, have numerous states enabled and carried out genocides since 1946, with little, and often late, intervention from global actors?
The process of declaring a mass conflict a genocide is an intricate task, requiring several criteria to be met. In some cases, such as the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, the evidence of the genocide was clear to international observers. Over 1 million people belonging to the Tutsi ethnic group were killed solely because of their ethnicity. Hutu extremists violated all statues put in place by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Bosniaks, a Muslim ethnic group were ethnically cleansed in Bosnian territory from 1992-5 following the conflicts for independence in the five former Yugoslavian republics. An estimated 100,000 Bosniaks were killed and over 2 million were displaced. Innocent people were slaughtered, tortured, and raped in a UN protected Bosniak enclave during the Bosnian War, marking the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.
These two cases clearly meet the criteria of a genocide, defined when physical violence is committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Characteristics of genocide include physical and mental components. When Hutu extremists set up roadblocks to confiscate IDs that displayed Rwandan’s ethnicities then subsequently murdered any Tutsi individuals, two of the five distinct physical events–killing members of the targeted group and causing serious bodily or mental harm to group members–were present.
While these two are the most straightforward components, the other three physical elements of a genocide are deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group's physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births within a group, and forcibly transferring the children of one group to another. Any one of these physical elements can be present to a level of magnitude to classify the event as a genocide.
In tandem with the physical element, there is a mental element to genocide that is more difficult to identify. When the President and Supreme Commander of the Bosnian Serb forces instructed the military to eliminate the Muslim population in the region, the intent was clear. In most cases, proving the intent to destroy a group, in whole or in part, is a more meticulous task.
It is important to understand the sensitivity and weight of the term genocide, and the historical cases that carry this label. On 16th of September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory stated that Israel is committing a genocide in Palestine. Their investigations over the past two years concluded that Israel has committed four out of the five genocidal acts defined in the Convention with explicit statements by Israeli civilians and military authorities indicating that these acts were committed with “intent to destroy Palestinians, in part or in whole, in the Gaza Strip.”
While there is ongoing debate on the war in Gaza as to whether ‘genocide’ is the correct classification, calls for humanitarian aid are clear. Contemporaneously, the terrorist organisation Hamas committed heinous crimes in Israel on 7th October 2023, which met mental indications of genocidal intent to eradicate Jewish people in the region. In this unique case, there are clear genocidal intentions by both Hamas and Israeli authorities.
The international community presumes that, once genocide becomes visible, awareness and intervention will follow. In the cases of the Rwandan Genocide and the Bosnian Genocide, the horrors committed against the Tutsis and Bosniaks were relatively unseen. The conditions and crimes were not broadcast on an international stage, and thus, intervention came too late.
Today, large-scale violence does not go unseen. We are currently witnessing the implementation of a peace treaty between Israel and Hamas with and the exchange of hostages has already begun. After two years of conflict, this latest development moves the region closer to a lasting peace agreement. As we have seen historically that a lack of visibility impedes international intervention, is it possible that the explicit statements and declarations by the UN in September influenced the timing of this peace-deal? If so, there is optimism that the mechanisms in place are working and may be even more efficient in the future at preventing the needless deaths of innocent people.
Image courtesy of Jaber Badwan via Wikimedia Commons, ©2025. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
