Mass atrocities don't just occur, they have to be organized and promoted. These days they can be instigated by something as simple as a text message or tweet.

At the Nuremburg Trials in 1946 Julius Streicher was sentenced to death for his role in the Holocaust. Streicher did not command...

In 2003 India, Brazil and South Africa formed IBSA, a political bloc of "emerging powers" dedicated to the transformation of the global order. It seemed like an unlikely club to embark upon such an ambitious enterprise.

India was once considered the epitome of an underdeveloped country with endemic poverty, a...

The bitter street fighting that has devastated parts of Damascus and Aleppo represents yet another ugly turning point in Syria's tragedy. What started as a democratic uprising a year and a half ago is now clearly a civil war.

It is shameful that after seventeen months of relentless bloodshed and...

On April 23 I was comfortably seated in row six at the Holocaust Memorial Museum when President Obama declared that "preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility" of the United States. Amongst the small crowd of holocaust survivors, government officials and...

At the recent "Friends of Syria" meeting in Turkey, Rwanda's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Louise Mushikiwabo, declared that despite the distance between Damascus and Kigali, "Rwanda and Syria share the same experiences." She denounced the killing of innocent people by the Syrian government and asserted that, "the responsibility to protect"...

As Homs was being demolished by artillery last week, the United Nations announced the appointment of its former Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, as Special Envoy to Syria. At a time when much of the media was debating military intervention and arming the Syrian rebels, his appointment brought some diplomatic balance to...

If nothing else, last weekend's double veto should have put a nail in the coffin of the idea that Russian opposition to UN Security Council action in Syria was about post-Libya fallout and the "Responsibility to Protect." The veto was about arms, allies and power. Nothing more, nothing less.

As...

Diplomacy is a shadowy and unpredictable business, but one thing is certain. If Russia uses its veto this week to block a second UN Security Council resolution on Syria, innocent people will die.

On 4 October last year when Russia and China vetoed the Security Council's first attempt to...