Director of the Mass Atrocity Response Operations Project, Michael C. Pryce, spoke in Blaustein last Wednesday about America's failure to prevent genocide.
Pryce, a former professor of Conflict Resolution at the US Army War College spoke of his time overseas as a marine and the profound effect this had on his worldview.
“I got to know a lot about war crimes in Kosovo and Bosnia,” he said.
Though Pryce comes from a military background, he believes that America has failed to prevent violence in other nations because of our inability to anticipate the future as we are constantly, “looking backwards.”
Pryce believes that the root of the problem is the classic planning design that the military continues to fall into when taking on foreign conflict.
“We tend to plan in a military paradigm,” he said, “friend vs. enemy.”
At the bottom of Pryce's design is a basic reconstitution of these military standards to a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities inherent to bringing an outside force into a native conflict.
“A given genocide will be comprised of perpetrators, victims, interveners and others,” he said.
The friend vs. enemy paradigm falls apart in these situations, a phenomenon that must be addressed according to Pryce in order to affectively create a plan that will have any positive effect.
“One of the most important things to consider is that improvisation is dead,” he said.
Pryce has a direct plan of attack concerning genocide, though not in the typical militaristic sense.
“We have to shift the planning paradigm,” he said. “We have to rely on predominantly non-military actions to prevent mass atrocities.”
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