W2I

The Will to Intervene (W2I) Project is a research initiative created by Lieut. General (retired) Roméo Dallaire, Senior Fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS), and Dr. Frank Chalk, MIGS Director, that aims to operationalize the principles of the Responsibility to Protect within national governments.

Led by researcher Kyle Matthews, more than 80 interviews were conducted with high-level policy-makers, members of Congress, parliamentarians, NGO representatives, and journalists in Canada and the United States, some for the first time on record. These interviews culminated in the publication of a policy report, Mobilizing the Will to Intervene: Leadership and Action to Prevent Mass Atrocities, in September 2009. This report was disseminated amongst the highest levels of the American and Canadian governments, think tanks, and non-governmental organisations. The report was subsequently re-edited and published as a book in 2010.

The project describes itself as follows:

The fundamental goal the W2I report, entitled Mobilizing the Will to Intervene: Leadership and Action to Prevent Mass Atrocities, is to identify strategic and practical steps to raise the capacity of government officials, legislators, civil servants, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), advocacy groups, journalists, and media owners and managers to build the political will to prevent mass atrocities. The report provides practical policy recommendations to make this goal a reality. The report draws on interviews with more than 80 foreign policy practitioners and opinion shapers in Canada and the United States. Many of the interviewees participated directly in Canadian and American government decision making during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and the 1999 Kosovo crisis, which exemplify a failure to act and a strong will to act. The W2I Project’s researchers also wanted to understand what civil society groups and the news media could have done to ramp up the pressure on Prime Minister Chrétien and President Clinton to save lives in Rwanda. They wanted to learn if civil society played a role in the decisions of Canada and the United States to preserve lives in Kosovo and what considerations propelled the decision to intervene. They designed their questions with an eye to the future, hunting for “lessons learned,” informed not only by their interviews, but also by scholarly studies of Canadian and U.S. Government policies. The report was made public in Canada on 22 September 2009. The Canadian parliamentary launch occurred on 1 October and featured distinguished panel of experts who discussed W2I’s policy recommendations for the benefit of parliamentarians.

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