Named after Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocity Prevention Act will bolster the ability of the US to contribute to ending and preventing genocide and mass atrocities wherever they occur. First introduced in 2016, the bill requires training for Foreign Service Officers placed in areas at risk of atrocities in order to better recognize and respond to early warning signs. It also supports interagency coordination through structures such as the Atrocities Prevention Board, to facilitate a whole-of-government approach to prevent and respond to emerging atrocities in at-risk countries. Finally, the Act requires regular reporting to Congress regarding these efforts.

Since 2009, when STAND students advocated for the passage of S.Con.Res 71, a resolution affirming U.S. national interest in preventing genocide, we have recognized the need to improve U.S. foreign policy approaches to emerging atrocity issues. Today, as an organization committed to building a world in which the global community is invested in preventing, mitigating, and sustainably resolving genocide and mass atrocities, we affirm this crucial, bipartisan effort towards achieving this vision.

This victory would not have been possible without the long-term commitment of our activists and our partner organizations, including the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Alliance for Peacebuilding, the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, Jewish World Watch, In Defense of Christians, Peace Direct, and many others.

Read the full text of the legislation here.

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Casey Bush is the co-Student Director of STAND. Casey recently graduated with her BA in History and Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts and is preparing to pursue a masters at the same institution. She is available for comment at cbush@standnow.org.

The jury is still out on whether I am really just another white woman with the weight of the world’s problems on my shoulders, but STAND truly has, most definitely, defied my cynicisms from the very first chapter meeting. Never have I encountered such thoughtful, genuinely passionate individuals so willing to adapt than the people I have met through STAND.

Over the past year or so, as chapter leader and as West Regional Organizer, I have met organizers, students giving up their free moments to learn and advocate, policy experts, and most importantly, survivors. Listening to women from Rwanda, Cambodia, Nigeria, Darfur, and South Sudan tell their stories of resilience shook me to my core. They reminded me of the power of the human soul like no religion class in my 13 years of Catholic schooling ever did.

Engaging with survivors, on-the-ground activists, and youth organizers to lead actions and campaigns has placed STAND and its leadership team at the front lines of a growing global youth network. It is a network of individuals ready to act, to hold even the most powerful human rights abusers accountable, and to provide students with the tools they need to make a difference. Taking part in this network has been the most fulfilling part of my STAND experience.

Beyond the concrete skills I have gained lobbying congressional offices and attending conferences and retreats, I have gained the support of amazing people in this movement to inform and uplift me. The best part is that, as a Managing Committee (MC) member, I get to welcome more student leaders into our network of solidarity and empower them with the tools to make us the Never Again Generation. Afterwards, I get to watch us all work together towards tangible policy goals at home and abroad.

Like I said, I was incredibly skeptical at first, but I shouldn’t have been. Every meeting and every conference I have attended was filled with leaders as eager to teach as they were to learn. Perhaps I could have gotten more involved sooner, and met these people earlier. That is my only regret. I am so grateful that I found a home at STAND, and cannot wait to see what we can accomplish next.

Check out available STAND Managing Committee positions for 2017-2018 here. Applications are due Friday, March 31 at 11:59 PM.

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Darcy Gleeson is a sophomore at the University of Southern California and is originally from Louisville, KY. She is the Vice President of her STAND chapter at USC and STAND’s West Coast Regional Organizer for the 2016-17 school year.

Why did you first get involved in STAND and how have you been involved since then?

I first became involved with STAND when I started a chapter at my high school. I loved being involved as a chapter president, and when I graduated, I really want to stay involved and share what I had learned with other chapters. So I joined the Managing Committee as a regional organizer, and it’s been one of my very best decisions!

Name a favorite STAND memory!

One of my favorite memories was at the Lemkin Summit, when I got to participate in a lobby meeting with staffers from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the meeting, we got to present our points about each conflict and have an amazing discussion about how to approach change in the Central African Republic. Hearing from the staffers about their commitment to the conflicts and faith in the power of student movements motivated me to work even harder this Spring!

What has your experience being on the MC been like?

Being a member of the MC has been a truly amazing experience and the best part of my year. While we often get sidetracked by food puns and cute animal pictures, the MC is a dedicated and hard-working group of people who are committed to the cause. Working in a community of people who care so much about genocide prevention is energizing, and I love being able to work with so many students across my region as well!

Can you tell us a little about what you do in your role as Regional Organizer?

I’m help run STAND’s Mid-Atlantic region, which means I work with chapters to help them get started, create new events, and build their membership. A lot of my job is connecting students with resources, discussing campaigns, and giving advice on the ins and outs of running their chapter and how to engage with national campaigns. If you like communicating, organizing, and helping other student leaders, this is the right position for you!

What’s one thing you’ve learned from your time in STAND, whether as a result of your experiences with your chapter, or being involved on the national level?

The biggest thing I have learned is that young people can make truly innovative change when we work together. From national emails, petitions, and lobbying to art campaigns, teach-ins, and blogging, students have demonstrated that they are capable of getting creative to make the change we need from the ground up. After seeing the energy and amazing events that chapters in my region have created, I know that students will stop at nothing to make meaningful change for a better world.

Carly is a freshman at American University. Reach out to her at cfabian@standnow.org.

One of my favorite things about STAND is the amazing community of passionate, inspirational students that it brings together. As a Regional Organizer on the STAND Managing Committee, you are part of two such amazing communities. The first is the Managing Committee (MC) as a whole. The people who make up the MC are some of the most talented, motivated, and kind people I have ever met. We create a (slightly dysfunctional) family that does all the important things together: celebrate successes, mourn tragedies, and come together at least once a week (and normally more) to talk about what’s happening next in our lives and for STAND.

The second is the community of chapter leaders that you interact with on a regular basis. As a Regional Organizer (RO), your main job is to support your chapters in whatever way they need and to ensure that they become empowered leaders of the anti-genocide movement. Through contact with chapter leaders, RO’s are given a unique opportunity to not only facilitate grassroots actions, but also see the incredible power that specific grassroots actions and movements have that make the world just a slightly better place. Throughout the year, you create strong bonds with the chapter leaders, and I consider my chapter leaders as really close friends.

I hope that you will consider applying to join this amazing STAND MC Family! If you have any questions about the Regional Organizer position in particular, or about any other position on the Managing Committee, feel free to email me atffreeman@standnow.org!

Francesca is a junior at the University of Chicago.

I want to change a culture. I’m not talking about pop culture – I’m talking about real culture. Deeply ingrained culture. The kind of culture that is so natural and unassuming that it can be hard to even recognize as part of a culture. How do you change a culture like this? Recognizing it is the first step.

Genocides and humanitarian wrongs are not the kinds of problems we grew up learning about on television. The problems we watched unfold were neat. Difficult? Sure. Violent? Sometimes. Scary? On occasion, but they were always resolved in a convenient 30-minute window. The bad guy was always unmasked, the resolution clearly defined, and the next episode of Scooby-Doo started. Neat. Unfortunately, the word “neat” is used very rarely in discussion about humanitarian issues, and always after the phrase, “this issue is not”.

When issues are complex, and we’re talking downright labyrinthian in many humanitarian cases, good people try to help the people that do understand. Most often, that means donating hard-earned dollars to organizations. We have a “bad” habit of throwing money at problems – we, America as a collective. I put bad in quotations because it isn’t a real problem; generosity is a fantastic trait, and money is a vital tool in the mending of almost any issue. It’s only a bad habit when we think we’ve seen the resolution and move on to the next episode.

How do you change a culture? You can start by simply acting. Don’t get me wrong, diving into some of these issues seems about as attractive as diving into a Nickelback greatest hits album, especially if you have a test on something like vector calc the next day. But you don’t have to understand the difference between the APRD, UFDR, CPJP, FDPC, and FACA to get started. I sure didn’t. I’m still a million miles from being an expert, but I’m making progress.

Every organization like STAND thrives on the human resource, and you can help simply by being an enthusiastic and willing volunteer. If your first volunteer mission is passing out flyers on campus with a partner, you’re making a friend! When you make a friend, you go back! When you go back you accidentally learn a little and then you accidentally learn a lot and all of a sudden you care deeply about the issues you once knew nothing about. All of a sudden, you’re providing something a lot more valuable than a twenty dollar check. Maybe you’re an informed, passionate person with a vested interest in the conflict in the Central African Republic, or an individual that wants to join the Peace Corps, and you’re someone that makes people around you want to do what you’re doing.

So how do you change a culture? Honestly, you probably don’t, at least not in the “Woodstock ‘69” sense. All you can do is act for yourself and hope your domino tips someone else’s. It doesn’t hurt to nudge a domino here or there though. Offer your roommate lunch if they go to a charity festival with you; I can think of maybe three people I’ve met in my collegiate existence that wouldn’t take me up on a free lunch, and people that don’t like free lunch aren’t people you should be associating with anyways.

We don’t live in a utopia, and until someone makes Adam Sandler stop making Grown Ups sequels, we never will. Still, the fact something can’t be perfected is not an excuse to abandon trying to make it better. If that were the case you would still be using t9 texting, and the Cavaliers would have signed Pau Gasol instead of Lebron.

Before my soapbox implodes:

As citizens of the world we have a responsibility to look out for our neighbors abroad just as we would a neighbor next door. We have a responsibility to inconvenience ourselves for the sake of making the world even a slightly better place. We each have a responsibility to shape our personal culture with such care that others are inspired to shape theirs. I’m working on changing my own culture, and I hope you do too.

*soapbox implodes*

Anyways, I’d love to hear any comments or questions you have, and if you like Grown Ups or Nickelback, I apologize. Email me at jramirez@standnow.org.

If there is one central idea that sums up my college experience so far, it would be this: everything is more complicated than I first thought.

Some examples.

“So I need to take 12 more classes from political science, African area studies, and anthropology to graduate.” Pause. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“So we find this Joe Kony guy and the fighting stops.” Pause. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“So I just fill out the application made up of two major essays, three recommendation letters, an online application, and an event attendance requirement and I’ll be eligible for the scholarship.” Pause. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“So I just tell everybody I know Tim and they’ll let me stay at the party.” Pause. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“So I just sit her down near a pond where it’s not raining and tell her how I feel and she’ll really, really want to kiss me.” Pause. “It’s more complicated than that.” (Good try, though)

I’m sure we all have hundreds of our own examples of this life lesson playing out. Unfortunately, there is a huge temptation to fight this complexity instead of embracing it, ignore it instead of engage with it. The second we decide to ignore this complexity is the second that we allow injustice to infiltrate areas of our life that we have the power to influence. This happens all the time both in our personal day-to-day as local, national, global citizens, and in history as we look at big picture in war, peace, atrocity and prevention.

As students, we all have different complexities we must choose to engage with in our particular concentrations. There is one system, however, that we all interact with most days and whose complexity has great potential for excruciatingly incremental, but real, social change.

Spending money.

We all spend money all the time. For a lot of us doing this whole college thing, our lifestyle, with the cost of attending school, costs more money in this season of life than it ever will… hopefully. Much of the time for me, spending money is thoughtless. If I need or want something, I evaluate whether I can afford it, then I either buy it or I don’t. My thought process is usually focused on my wants and needs and capabilities instead on the significance or social weight of the expenditure. I rarely think about what these $4 mean beyond, “I need toilet paper.” (Toilet paper always feels ridiculously expensive to me.)

The significance reaches far beyond me or us, however. The power in our spending is a complexity that many of us don’t engage with during our day-to-day spending. More and more, as our options have become aisles long, everything we buy is as much a decision tonot buy something else. Each dollar we spend is an investment in something, and also an investment in everything that went into getting that something to you. When you buy an organic apple instead of a conventionally grown apple, you buy an apple, sure. But you also invest in the ideas behind organic agriculture.

This thinking is nothing new. What we need to do is realize that there is no neutral. A dollar spent, no matter how hard we think about it, is a dollar invested in a labyrinth of different ideas. Once we acknowledge that, a responsibility falls on us to make sure that our investment is a wise one.

That is where genocide prevention comes in (finally, Luke, gosh). The various conflicts that are currently ongoing and that continually emerge are not isolated in a vacuum; they are fed by the unstoppable exchange of ideas and goods that flow through our conversations and communities. In short, what we do influences, with various degrees of subtlety, conflict areas around the world. When you look at the importance of currency and physical resources in fueling or sustaining conflict, the gravity of even our personal financial decisions is easy to appreciate as we watch them multiplied by many millions across the globe.

This responsibility is heightened, however, when we look beyond our personal lives and examine our collective influence associated with the communities we are a part of. Personally, as an American, I look at United States’ foreign policy as one of these influences. The aid we send, where it goes, where we invest resources, why we invest resources etc. are all ways that Americans, as a community, support ideas that have profound influences on conversations happening around the world.

Focusing in on students, one of the significant communities within which we as students have an influence is our schools. Here at Ohio University, which I can see from here on my front porch as I type, there has been a significant and prolonged push for ethical investment practices rooted in a Conflict Free Campus Initiative (CFCI) campaign started a number of years ago. A group of students, who would later become a STAND chapter, saw their university community and the money that it invests, as a huge opportunity for responsible promotion of ideas on a scale significantly larger than each individual acting alone. Over the past 5 years, that pressure to eliminate conflict minerals from the university portfolio has spilled over into pressure on the university to invest responsibly in a number of other issues.

These investment procedures vary from place to place and are always very intricate and complex. The ways that our money decisions, both personally and collectively, influence the global conversation and even atmospheres of genocide, are subtle and hard to connect. Again the message: it’s more complicated than you think. But we, as an engaged community of students, must be sure to embrace the complexity of these connections instead of shying away from them. There is no neutral. Once we ignore the responsibility of this interconnectedness because of the complexity, we open our influence up to irresponsible and damaging effects that can have significant impacts.

Here are some steps to take when thinking about this subject:

Think of the thing you buy most often (coffee for me) and do a little research. Trace the physical resources that are used and the ideas that are promoted when you buy the item.

Take this same process and apply it to your school. What ideas are they promoting with the money that they have? (This information is usually complicated, unfortunately, and not easily found online, probably on purpose. I would recommend finding someone, a teacher, professor, or administrator, to explain it to you, but knowing the whole process, especially in higher education, is really, really helpful.)

Trace these ideas and products you spend money on and find ways that they link back to conflicts around the world. The STAND chapter here at OU was started by a girl researching the materials in her cellphone for a class and discovering conflict minerals mined in the Congo. There are connections, we just need to find them.

And finally, if you have cool stories or thoughts or anything to share, then SHARE. This type of subtle influence is something we always need to be reminded of. E-mail me at lkubacki@standnow.org. This topic fascinates me and I’d love to hear about anything you’ve experienced.

No country is immune to a genocidal period. However, there are many factors that raise the possibility of a genocide occurring in a country during any one period. For the purposes of this post, we can define genocide as: any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such : (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Here are five of the most potent factors:

1. A non-democratic government. Democratically elected governments have committed very few acts of genocide, due to the responsiveness to public pressures felt by democracies. Autocracies, totalitarian states and communist governments have committed the most deadly acts of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries.

2. A state of war or rebellion. War creates the perfect cover for genocide. Add in the fact that many times rebellions and insurrections in the modern world are often fought by ethnic minorities in their country, and wartime becomes a dangerous time for potential ethnic cleansing and genocide.

3. A bipolar social structure. One of the most dangerous ways a society can be socially structured is into two opposing groups, which creates an “us and them” mentality. A bipolar social structure is often a socially constructed. In Rwanda before its genocidal period, the concept of ethnicity was used to establish a social order that encouraged Tutsi hegemony over a Hutu majority. This is especially apparent in post-colonial societies; colonizers structured societies to gain greater control over territory during the colonial period. The problems that stem from colonial legacies remain for many decades after independence.

4. Dangerous language and symbols. Your high school English teacher isn’t the only one who knows the power that symbols and symbolism can have over people. Symbols can effectually dehumanize groups of people, one of the steps on the road to genocide. In the Holocaust, Jews were forced to wear a yellow star, something that became central to how they were viewed. If you don’t think symbols are important, think of how much power the swastika still holds almost 70 years after the fall of the Third Reich. In more recent times, Tutsis in Rwanda were called cockroaches leading up to the 1994 genocide, and there has been widespread hate speech against the Rohingya in Burma as well as the spread of anti-Muslim sentiments.

5. Societal polarization. Moves towards the extreme end of the political spectrum in a country should be a warning sign that something bad could be occurring. This can manifest itself in arrests of well known moderates, or silencing of voices urging cooperation and restraint. Media outlets play a major role in this factor, as they are the ones putting out both moderate and extremist views. In late March of this year, newspapers in Burma were asked to no longer report about violence visited against the Rohingya people.

Knowledge of the factors that make genocide more likely to occur can mean prevention of future tragedies. When these elements exist within a society, advocates should be more vigilant, and call on those with the capacity to make a change to do so.

Everyone knows what happened twenty years ago in a small nation in Central Africa. Over 800,000 men, women and children were murdered in a period of three months. Their only crime was of belonging to the wrong ethnicity, and in some cases, the wrong political faction; in other words, being Tutsi or a moderate Hutu. The extremists waited for their cue in beginning their murderous mayhem that swept the entire nation of Rwanda. After the President’s plane was shot down by unknown assailants on April 6th, the Hutu extremists began killing without mercy while most of the world stood on the sidelines. One of the most shameful aspects of the tragedy was the US demand for the withdrawal of the remaining UN force that was left behind and their refusal to intervene, along with the rest of the world.

Despite all of the horror throughout the genocide and the betrayal of the international community, it is easy to forget the few examples where acts of humanity took place. Carl Wilkens, for instance, was the only American civilian who stayed during the genocide. Mr. Wilkens and a colleague saved hundreds of orphans who would have been killed. Another example is of Capt. Mbaye Diagne, an unarmed UN observer from Senegal. In the early hours of the genocide, he defied orders to stay neutral and single-handedly rescued hundreds of lives by shuttling civilians to and from UN safe sites. Tragically, he was killed on May 31st and the exact number of lives he saved remains a mystery.

Other examples include the fearless aid workers treating the wounded and the small group of UN peacekeepers, with limited resources who somehow[S9] managed to save thousands. These men and women have set examples of heroism, courage, and humanity. They have set the bar on how to respond to a crisis and we can only hope that others will follow suit in current conflicts (Central African Republic, Congo, and Syria to name a few). In the FRONTLINE documentary Ghosts of Rwanda , Mr. Wilkens said that all of us have the potential to do good and evil. This was the case during the genocide in Rwanda where people chose to do acts of evil and kindness.

This April, we need to honor the 800,000 lives that were lost, the thousands of survivors who endured the trauma and have had the resilience to rebuild, and of course, we have to honor the brave individuals who stayed and did everything possible to save lives.

Over the past several years, international human rights abuses have been given more and more media attention. The events that have taken place in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and more have compelled more Americans to think about foreign intervention for humanitarian purposes. Within the anti-genocide movement in particular, as the picture has gotten more complex, consciousness of our role in “stopping” genocide has expanded. As anti-genocide activists, many of us no longer entertain the notion that we can “stop” genocide, and we accept that most of our activism has no effect on those that are affected by genocide.

It is good that we are acknowledging the complexity of the contexts we are working with, but this rising consciousness has contributed to a decline in participation. The picture has become so complex that it has become harder to recruit people to participate in anti-genocide activism. The anti-genocide movement is not as immediately inspiring, and as a result, the movement is not as strong as it once was. An aura of resignation in response to the fact that there is very little we can do is spreading at an alarming rate.

At the risk of going back to the black-and-white rhetoric used so frequently a decade ago, I want to insist this is something that we as anti-genocide activists – indeed, as citizens and as humans – cannot let happen. I say this as someone of Armenian descent in the anti-genocide movement. The Armenian Genocide of 1915, or, as we say in Armenian, Medz Yeghern (“Great Crime”), is approaching its hundredth anniversary next year, and my ties to the Armenian Genocide are a constant motivation for my involvement within anti-genocide work. Over the past few weeks, however, it is not the past that has been the main source of my anxieties surrounding the persecution of Armenians, but the present. Currently, Christian minorities, including Armenians, are being targeted in Kessab, Syria. Kessab is a hub of Armenian culture near the border of Turkey and Syria, and over the past few weeks, rebel groups such as al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front have invaded Kessab after crossing into Syria through the Turkish border. Homes and churches have been destroyed, private property has been pillaged, and families have been forced to flee their homes. Getting credible information has been very difficult, and as a result, while many Armenians are attempting to raise awareness of what is happening to our people in Kessab, we are more often than not trying to determine what exactly is happening.

I do not know what, if anything, I can do. I teach a class of sixth and seventh-graders at my local Armenian church’s Sunday school, and when they ask me if there is anything we can do, I am at a loss for words. I see adults fretting about how Armenians are still not safe, and I experience microaggressions against Armenians who are “just crying genocide again” on the Internet. The complexity of the issue has become more personal, and it is very scary.

My confusion and the confusion of many of those who do anti-genocide work is especially relevant as we commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Reminders of the untold human suffering that engulfed the country over the hundred days during which the genocide took place has strong potential to heighten the defeating sentiments that have taken a strong position within the anti-genocide movement. But with international human rights abuses continuing to occur, with survivors of the Rwandan Genocide still bravely speaking about their experiences, and with so many people in the world that have been affected by genocide in some way, we as anti-genocide activists must find ways to work through the complexity that we are faced with.

We must reflect on our privileges, and how they affect our views about genocide and the work that we do. Many of us are white, middle-class students, and we must recognize the privileges that these social identities afford us. We cannot know the detrimental effects of racism and poverty, societal problems that can influence the causes of genocide and mass atrocities, from personal experience. Many of us also work in contexts that have been heavily influenced by western media and western images of so-called “third-world countries” that promote the idea that those who live in Africa (a continent consisting of fifty-four nations!) just need to be “saved” by white westerners. We cannot shy away from difficult conversations that delve deeper into these ideas, and we must embrace the constant evolution of the anti-genocide movement.

Most importantly, however, we must listen to and support survivors, for any effective anti-genocide movement must prioritize the voices of those directly affected by genocide. With many instances of genocide and mass atrocities, such as the Rwandan Genocide, we have the privilege of survivors who are still living and are willing to share their experiences. With many other instances of genocide and mass atrocities, this is no longer the case. When I was very small, there were always a few survivors at commemoration events for the Armenian Genocide. Now that the genocide was a century ago, however, there are almost no survivors left, and so many of their perspectives are lost forever. The most important thing we can do as anti-genocide activists is listen to survivors whenever we can for as long as we can, for they are ultimately the only ones who can determine how to remember and pay honor to those who did not survive – regardless of how low or high our consciousness of our role is and how defeated we may sometimes feel.

To learn more about the resolutions discussed in this blog and find out how you can take action visit here.

April is Genocide Prevention and Awareness Month, and two resolutions have recently been proposed, one in the House and one in the Senate, that could improve the American ability to prevent further atrocities.

A House Resolution regarding the Republic of South Sudan was put forth by Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) who sits on the Subcommittee for Africa, Global Health, Human Rights, and International Organizations. The resolution, House Resolution (H. Res.) 503, discusses the overall need to provide the world’s newest state with assistance in order to bring about social, political, and economic stability. In the Senate, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), who has a long history of engaging on African issues, proposed Senate Resolution (S. Res.) 375. The resolution condemns recent violence, encourages good governance, and proposes future international cooperation to aid civilians and reduce violence in the Central African Republic (CAR).

Since gaining its independence in July of 2011, South Sudan has faced numerous challenges in bringing about stability for its people after a long history of civil war. In this period, the government of South Sudan has struggled to combat long-standing ethnic divisions that have directly impacted South Sudanese politics. In December 2013 conflict broke out as tensions erupted between parties aligned with the President Salva Kiir and the former Vice-President Riek Machar. The initial spark of violence, which government officials claimed to be a failed coup attempt, resulted in the arrest of political opposition leaders and the displacement of over 800,000 people. It is this type of political environment that continues to overshadow large-scale ongoing humanitarian relief efforts within the country.

Representative Smith’s resolution represents an all-encompassing plan to assist the government of South Sudan in combating conflict within the country. Firstly, the resolution would reinforce the ceasefire signed on January 23rd, 2013 as well as the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of combatants. The resolution also includes multiple clauses allowing the US to provide support in creating good governance within the country and strengthening its regional ties within Central and West Africa. Lastly the resolution proposes that the US provide financial and technical assistance in grassroots reconciliation and development efforts with a focus on capacity building in order to support long-term stability.

CAR had long had a weak central government that was unable, and generally unwilling, to effectively deliver services to large portions of its population. In December of 2012, Seleka, a majority-Muslim political and military alliance from CAR’s northeast, began a rebellion against the government of President Bozize with the help of mercenaries from Chad and Sudan. Four months later, they succeeded in overthrowing Bozize and Seleka leader Michel Djotodia was installed as President. However, he quickly proved unable to control or disband Seleka troops, who began to abuse civilians en masse. In response, majority-Christian “anti-balaka” militias formed to protect their communities, but they quickly became just as abusive and the conflict took on an increasing sectarian tone. Djotodia was eventually replaced by Catherine Samba Panza in January 2014, and anti-Muslim persecution has caused the majority of CAR’s Muslim population to flee to Chad. Roughly half of CAR’s population, or 2.2 million people, currently need humanitarian assistance.

S. Res. 375 firstly condemns the violence in the CAR and welcomes attempts to decrease religious tensions in the country. Next, it commends various actors, from the African Union to France to the Economic Community of Central African States, for their previous mitigation efforts. Third, the resolution calls for a short-term multilateral approach to CAR. Finally, the resolution calls on President Obama to develop a long-term approach to CAR that would provide funds, work with international partners, and return a diplomatic presence to the country in order to help achieve peace.

Overall, the passing of H. Res. 503 and S. Res. 375 would mark as a huge success for the consolidated support of atrocity prevention within US foreign policy. Resolutions such as these present a positive approach to bring about long-term stability within states struggling with violent conflict and mass atrocities.