Sovereignty, Silence, and the Cycle of Violence: International Response, Intervention Failure, and Impunity Dynamics Across 16 Genocidal Regimes

Abstract

For seventy-eight years the international community has repeated the promise of “never again,” yet genocide has recurred with grim regularity. This dissertation asks why the architecture of international accountability has expanded across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries even as mass atrocity has persisted, and it locates the answer in what it terms the impunity–atrocity nexus: the permissive structure through which the failure to punish one génocidaire lowers the perceived cost of the next. The study assembles the first unified dataset covering 16 genocidal leaderships across nearly three centuries (1755–2026), from the Qianlong Emperor’s destruction of the Dzungars to Omar al-Bashir’s Darfur campaign, and sorts them into four Impunity Profiles reflecting the international system’s response capacity during each regime’s tenure. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods design integrates negative binomial regression (NBR) and non-parametric tests with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and comparative historical analysis, drawing on the CIRIGHTS Data Project, the Political Terror Scale, the Transitional Justice Evaluation Tools, United Nations Security Council voting records, and International Criminal Court documents. Three findings anchor the argument. First, major power protection is the single strongest predictor of impunity (ρ = .80, p < .001; Fisher’s exact p = .005), with every one of nine P5-protected leaders escaping accountability while five of seven unprotected leaders faced it. Second, fsQCA identifies MPS*NVG*~IJM—major power support, victim dehumanization, and the absence of an international judicial mandate—as the dominant recipe for impunity (consistency = .96). Third, a Judicial Mandate Paradox emerges: judicial mechanisms strongly predict eventual accountability (ρ = –.87) but not lower death tolls (ρ = –.20, p = .45), and every full-accountability case required military defeat. Impunity nonetheless declines across time (1.00 → 0.33 from Profile 1 to Profile 4), suggesting incremental institutional evolution constrained by the persistence of the veto shield. The dissertation reconceptualizes sovereignty as a conditional status and offers evidence-based implications for the Responsibility to Protect, the ICGLR, and United Nations genocide-prevention policy.