Operationalising Mass Atrocity Prevention: The United Kingdom's Approach

The UK government’s approach to preventing mass atrocities has been subjected to
close scrutiny for several years, prompting institutional changes in the foreign office
at a country level in 2019 and later at a departmental level in 2022. Nonetheless,
research has revealed a lack of clarity around what atrocity prevention looks like for
the UK in practice, and no in-depth academic study of the government’s operational
approach has been conducted to date. This thesis addresses this gap by providing
empirical insight into the way the UK has responded to the risk and commission of
mass atrocity crimes in different contexts over time. The first part is primarily
concerned with the UK’s approach broadly speaking, including the operational impact
of conceptual shifts and institutional changes as well as the prospects for internalising
the Responsibility to Protect principle. The second part sheds empirical light on the
UK’s approach in four different contexts using four distinct tools, namely: targeted
sanctions in Myanmar, defence cooperation with Saudi Arabia in the context of its
war in Yemen, multilateral military assistance through MINUSMA in Mali, and
bilateral development programming in Kenya. In doing so, the thesis unpacks an
approach which is not only vulnerable to inconsistencies but also one which has been
pervasively more responsive to the commission of atrocities than to the risk they
might occur. This, I suggest, points to a reactive and incoherent operational approach.
The findings nevertheless call attention to the nuances of UK mass atrocity prevention
at a time when the government is redefining what that means in practice.