A major policy initiative in the field of foreign affairs, the Will to Intervene Project, has now become a book and deserves Canadians’ serious attention. The project’s co-directors are Frank Chalk and Roméo Dallaire. Chalk comes from a family that suffered grievously in the Holocaust. Dallaire, now a senator, is an all-Canadian hero for his gallant actions to buck the tide of international indifference to the unfolding genocide in Rwanda. At the heart of the Will to Intervene Project, based at Concordia University in Montreal, is the despairing conclusion that there was a political will not to intervene in the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The goal is to study the lessons of that alongside the lessons of 1999 in Kosovo, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization did intervene, in order to break the cycle of international indifference. The core of the research is interviews conducted with more than 80 policy makers and opinion leaders. On that basis, interrelated lessons are drawn...
Ramesh Thakur is a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. A member of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty and a former United Nations assistant secretary general, he is the author of The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and The Responsibility to Protect: Norms, Laws and the Use of Force in International Politics (London: Routledge, forthcoming). In 2011 he takes up a new position as professor of international relations at the Australian National University.
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