Nils Gilman is a deputy editor of Noema Magazine and the chief operating officer at the Berggruen Institute.
Zachariah Mampilly is the Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at The City University of New York and a member of the doctoral faculty in the Department of Political Science at the Graduate Center at CUNY. He is the co-founder of the Program on African Social Research and the author of “Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life during War.” (Cornell University Press, 2011)
A. Dirk Moses is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the City College of New York, CUNY. He is a scholar of genocide and international affairs, memory studies and modern Germany. His latest book is “The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression” (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Every geopolitical order contains the seeds of its own demise, usually in the form of internal contradictions between its different elements. For the so-called liberal international order, one such contradiction, and ultimately its fatal one, was between the norm against the military conquest of foreign territory — the principle that international borders were not to be rewritten by force — and the conflicting norm to prevent genocide and other human rights atrocities, which can mean military intervention across borders.
Vladimir Putin, for example, justifies the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine by alleging, without any evidence, that there was an ongoing “genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime” led by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who he denounces as a Nazi even though he is Jewish.
But it wasn’t Russia that first authored the script for a new kind of rationalization for territorial expansion based on the imperative to prevent genocide and other atrocities — it was Israel and Rwanda, two Western-oriented states. Both nations’ contemporary national identities are strongly grounded in the memorialization of their population’s survival of genocide. As Israel and Rwanda have undertaken extraterritorial adventures over recent decades, Western states have turned a blind eye or supported them, thereby undermining the “rules-based international order” that they publicly extoll.
In that way, the imperative of “never again” that lies at the center of global Holocaust memory culture has become a template for geopolitical entrepreneurs to challenge the injunction against violent territorial expansion.
“Every geopolitical order contains the seeds of its own demise.”
“Liberal” International Norms
The norm against foreign military intervention was first formalized in the United Nations Charter in 1945 and became essentially ironclad by 1975 with the end of European colonialism. This norm meant that nation-states were expected to fulfill their “national destinies” within their internationally recognized borders. Applying the lessons of German expansionism, the framers of the Charter envisaged that postwar stability would prevail if states did not have to fear the annexationist ambitions of their neighbors or even great powers.
This norm did not mean that cross-border military interventions were completely off the table. It only proscribed interventions without United Nations Security Council authorization, and especially territorial conquest by force. With or without the Council’s blessing, the United States, for example, intervened militarily in Lebanon in 1982, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Kuwait in 1991, Haiti in 1994, the former Yugoslavia repeatedly in the 1990s and of course Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya in the decade after 9/11 (to say nothing of countless covert operations). The Soviets likewise intervened in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. But in none of these cases was territorial expansion part of the agenda. Indeed, in the case of the Gulf War in 1991, the ostensible casus belli for the U.S. was precisely to roll back Iraq’s annexation of what Saddam Hussein claimed was the wayward Iraqi province of Kuwait.
And then there was the conflicting norm that a state could invade another to interdict atrocities being committed there. Although “humanitarian intervention” was an idea and practice that stretched back to the 19th century, in 1948, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the U.N. established a convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide: of “never again.” Its inspirer, Raphael Lemkin, viewed the convention in the tradition of humanitarian intervention to prevent atrocities in other countries.
For the first few decades after 1948, it was unclear how the “never again” convention was supposed to be enforced. And in fact, state-sponsored atrocities continued in some places with impunity. The mass killing of suspected communists in Indonesia in 1965, the civil war in Nigeria two years later, civilian slaughters in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Cambodia, Uganda, Rhodesia, Burundi and the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s — all took place under the nose of the international community. None provoked an external intervention to stop or prevent the atrocities. When India tried to claim it was engaging in a humanitarian intervention in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in late 1971, other states rejected that label.
“The imperative of ‘never again’ that lies at the center of global Holocaust memory culture has become a template for geopolitical entrepreneurs to challenge the injunction against violent territorial expansion.”
With the end of the Cold War, this passivity began to change. Mass killings in Rwanda in 1994 and in Bosnia in 1995 marked an important turning point for the operationalization of the anti-genocide norm. Though international military forces failed to stop the atrocities in both countries, the U.N. would later establish criminal tribunals to prosecute those responsible for the bloodshed, and an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty developed the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) concept in 2001.
Those in Washington who like to present U.S. foreign policy in moral terms found the concept particularly delightful. The Bush administration invoked humanitarian aims in its Iraq invasion in 2003, and the U.S. and other actors invoked “never again” in relation to the conflict in Darfur in 2004. R2P was adopted by the heads of state and governments gathered at the World Summit in 2005 and is now endorsed by the U.N. Soon after, in 2008, Western states tried to extend its remit to natural disasters as a way to intervene in Myanmar when its military regime was accused of failing to respond to a cyclone, only to be resisted by China, Russia and South Africa, among other states.
A political norm rather than a new law, R2P conceives of sovereignty as conferring an obligation on states to safeguard their populations from the four atrocity crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Failure to do so (or the prospect of such a failure) can provide grounds for the Security Council to authorize a “humanitarian intervention,” as it did in Libya in 2011.
Genocide Survivor States
The imperative of “never again” that underpinned R2P unwittingly provided cover for a new form of territorial expansionism, one most clearly exemplified by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and Rwanda’s intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As psychologically scarred post-genocide states with the explicit raison d’être of protecting their people from further horrors, Israel and Rwanda both understand geopolitics in terms of permanent security: warding off existential exogenous threats present and future, creating not just a need but an obligation to expand territorially.
For Israel, its security policy depends on “strategic depth” and what one Israeli scholar calls the “permanent preemptive war against terrorism (i.e., the Palestinians)” to protect its civilian population. Now that hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in the occupied West Bank, atrocity prevention requires protecting them, too, even though they are illegal settlers on Palestinian land. Likewise, for the Rwandan government, aiding ethnic Tutsis in Congo has become a useful cover for seizing resources in the eastern part of the country. The result is an endless Israeli war on Palestinians and recurring Rwandan invasions of Congo.
Leaders of both Israel and Rwanda see each other as engaged in a conjoined political project. They formally recognize each other as kindred “survivor states” and tout their “special, strong and fruitful relationship,” which includes visits by heads of state in the past decade as well as continuing efforts to foster cooperation in diplomacy, technology, agriculture and trade. And both states also understand and support each other’s efforts to instrumentalize their histories as genocide survivors as a means of expansive political claims-making in the present.
The Rwandans have directly copied Israeli memorialization of the Holocaust; the Kigali Genocide Memorial, for example, regularly holds events to commemorate the Holocaust. Rwanda has also agreed to accept African refugees from Israel. Jewish civil society organizations have taken an intense interest in the Rwandan genocide, positioning it as analogous to the Holocaust; Tutsis sometimes represent themselves with pride as “the Jews of Africa,” and the Rwandan state views Israel as a model society. As one sympathetic Israeli journalist observed, “The destinies of the Jewish and Rwandan people are connected not just in their having both experienced two of the most horrible mass crimes in human history but in their respective leaders’ commitment to ensure that ‘Never Again’ means never again.”
“Israel and Rwanda both understand geopolitics in terms of permanent security: warding off existential exogenous threats present and future, creating not just a need but an obligation to expand territorially.”
The Zones Of Interest: Eretz Israel
Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War in 1967 has never been formally recognized by the U.N., which still designates them as “occupied territories.” However, for years, Western states subtly undermined the norm by only paying lip service to the idea of a “two-state solution,” in which Palestinian and Syrian occupied territories were one day to be handed back after negotiated peace treaties. The diplomatic consensus masked a secret that Israel was effectively annexing these territories, as the International Court of Justice recognized in July 2024. The Trump administration’s decision in 2019 to affirm Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights was an official acceptance of those annexations, and it also marked the formal collapse of the anti-annexationist norm and established Israel as the pioneer of a shift to a new international order.
Israel’s unexpected victory and territorial gains in 1967 reawakened messianic dreams in certain nationalist-religious sections of its population, which began building unauthorized settlements in the West Bank. When a right-wing government led by the Likud Party took power in 1977, state aid to the settlement movement increased. The new Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, was a believer in a Greater (Eretz) Israel and often referred Jewish historical, theological and security claims to “the whole land of Israel.” The imagined extent of the nation was biblical in nature, with God’s promise extending from “the river of Egypt” to the Euphrates: eastern Sinai, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, most of Syria and southeastern Turkey. These were the territories that King David and King Solomon were thought to have once controlled. Eretz Israel was holy, the land sacred.
After a setback in the 2006 election, the expansionist Greater Israel vision of longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and allied factions has largely prevailed. Far-right ministers now sit in his cabinet and actively call for the settlement of conquered Gaza after the “voluntary” emigration of Palestinians, and also of occupied southern Lebanon, which they claim is “part of Israel’s promised territory.”
The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel strengthened the hardliners’ hand by providing the occasion for Israel to reconquer Gaza and parts of Lebanon. It has also delegitimized those within Israel who were prepared to return (at least parts of) the West Bank and Gaza in return for “peace,” although there was never a real willingness to allow a territorially contiguous and sovereign Palestinian state. Today, substantial sections of the Israeli population envisage peace and security in Greater Israel terms: as strategic depth enabled by the annexation and ethnic cleansing of portions of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.
While some Israeli commentators play down expansionism, the facts on the ground today tell a different story. Israeli forces occupy Syrian territory, including its tallest peak, Mount Hermon, with no plans to leave. Conquest is again exciting the Greater Israel imagination: The mountain was mentioned in a poem about historical Zion by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Odessa-born founder of Revisionist Zionism, which sought to establish a Jewish nation on both sides of the Jordan River. Although no formal annexation has been announced, it is hard to see Israel returning the land.
In addition to rhetoric that promises security from Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s threats, Israeli leaders today propose a humanitarian logic for expansion into Syria, according to which they will protect its minorities, especially their “natural allies,” the Druze and Kurds, who they say are at risk of abuse by the new Sunni Arab government. “We are obligated to our Druze brothers in Israel to do everything to prevent harm to their Druze brothers in Syria, and will take all the necessary steps to maintain their safety,” declared a recent Israeli government statement. Likewise, Israel’s leading security think tank proposed that “transferring” Gazans to other countries is the best way “to alleviate humanitarian pressure” and end Hamas’s tyranny.
Distinguishing the contemporary claims for Eretz Israel is the claim that this expansionism, while nominally a crime under international law, is made necessary by the need to prevent atrocity crimes. That the Jewish people, in whose name the Israeli government claims to speak, have within living memory been the target of such an attack provides a novel basis of legitimation for expansionist claims. This logic differs from classic nationalist justifications of expansionism, whose main plea was that all peoples sharing a common cultural origin (or language) deserved to be unified under a single administrative banner and not to be ruled over by people from a different ethnolinguistic background.
“Political elites in countries like Russia and Rwanda use ‘population security’ as a defense for their interventions abroad.”
“Unique Security Needs”: Rwandan Neo-Irridentism
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, irredentism referred to the aim of a state or national movement to expand its borders to incorporate an “orphan population” of ethnic kin left behind in a neighboring state’s territory, or to reclaim a territory that had once been a part of the state. Despite redrawing the ostensibly inviolable sovereign borders of neighboring states that this would require, irredentists justified their claims either through appeals to real or imagined historical pasts — or they framed it as an effort to create a more “natural border” that would better serve the interests of the allegedly persecuted orphan population (and possibly the donor state as well) by resolving the ethnically driven political tensions that spurred the irredentist urge in the first place.
Unlike back then, when the nation-state began ascending to global supremacy, today’s neo-irredentists avoid invoking, and often explicitly deny, an ethnic motive for their expansionist practices. Political elites in countries like Russia and Rwanda use “population security” as a defense for their interventions instead. By suggesting that they are only seeking to resolve persistent issues with violence, conflict or terrorism — and even going as far as claiming a humanitarian intention behind their actions — they seek to avoid the stench of the racial nationalisms that once appeared to consign old-fashioned irredentism to history’s dustbin.
Rwanda’s justifications for its military intervention into eastern Congo exemplify the emergence of this new, post-genocide form of irredentism. While external observers frequently suggest irredentism as motivating Rwanda’s actions, the country’s longstanding ruler, Paul Kagame, continues to deny any such motives, framing his actions as a response to the failure of the broader international community. In this narrative, Rwanda is not an aggressor but a savior that must intervene in order to fend off both domestic and international bad actors: “This eastern Congo problem, which I have in the past indicated is Congo’s problem as a whole and for our region, for the continent and for the rest of the world,” Kagame has said. “The cause of it and many factors that perpetuate that problem are from different parts of the world, including from the big countries.”
Yet, expansionist desires have long shaped the dreams of the country’s ruling Tutsi elite. In the late 19th century, the precolonial Kingdom of Rwanda intermittently ruled areas now located in Congo. As in many places, the formalization of borders by Europeans left behind Rwandan minorities in what became Belgian Congo. During and after decolonization, under the Mobutu regime in what was then called Zaire, these populations developed new synthetic identities that mixed elements of this earlier history with the much more diverse ethnic landscape they encountered in Congo.
“Like Israel, Rwanda’s foreign policy embraces post-genocide politics and deploys humanitarian intervention rhetoric to justify the protection of putative members of the same ethnic community in its ‘near abroad.’”
It was the Rwandan Genocide that inadvertently provided the justification for the fulfillment of Tutsi expansionist dreams. One of the most unspeakable atrocities of the late 20th century, the 1994 genocide was fomented by a Hutu-led government. What brought the slaughter to an end was the invasion from Uganda of an army led by Kagame, an ethnic Tutsi. The genocidaires fled, mostly taking refuge in eastern Congo. In the decades since, there has been an unending series of conflicts with complex mixed motives that include the plunder of mineral riches crucial to global supply chains. The government of Congo, a thousand miles or so to the west, has experienced several regime changes and has been incapable of responding effectively.
In this context, the Congolese Tutsi, a community estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands, have faced questions from neighboring ethnic communities and national politicians about their political loyalties. They confront both residential and workplace discrimination, scapegoating and hate speech, as well as targeted killings and recurring assassinations of community leaders. The community has long been divided over how best to resolve these tensions, with some leaders preferring negotiation and integration into the Congolese nation as full citizens. Others, however, have given up hope of a political settlement, pointing to their ambiguous citizenship status and recurring conflicts that afflicted the community even prior to the Rwandan intervention.
It is this latter group that is behind the emergence of M23, a movement founded with the overt support of the government in Kigali to protect the Congolese Tutsi community. In early 2025, M23 overran the key cities of Goma and Bukavu and, according to the head of the U.N.’s stabilization mission in Congo, has since installed “a parallel administration.” Many believe that M23’s ambition is to “redraw the map” of the Great Lakes Region, perhaps in line with the vision proposed in 1996 by then-Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu, who called for a second Berlin Conference to revise borders by allowing Rwanda to annex some areas of the Kivu region.
M23 relies on Rwandan patronage and even direct military support for its actions. While Kagame has rejected the idea that Rwanda’s intervention is driven by irredentism, emphasizing Rwanda’s security interests instead, other influential Tutsi leaders champion the dream of “Greater Rwanda.” Kagame has endorsed many of the central ideas driving the movement, albeit ambiguously. In a speech about the Congolese conflict in 2023, for example, Kagame said:
The borders that were drawn during colonial times cut our country into pieces. A big part of Rwanda was left outside in eastern Congo, in southwestern Uganda and so forth. You have populations in these parts of other countries other than Rwanda who have a Rwandese background. But they are not Rwandans. They are citizens of those countries that have absorbed those parts of Rwanda in the colonial times. … And these people have been denied their rights within Congo.
Like Israel, Rwanda’s foreign policy embraces post-genocide politics and deploys humanitarian intervention rhetoric to justify the protection of putative members of the same ethnic community in its “near abroad,” thereby recruiting a central element of the postwar order’s moral legitimation: genocide prevention. Exhibiting the cover of this approach, atrocity prevention seminars are held in Rwanda by Western NGOs while Rwandan-backed forces commit atrocities in Congo.
Indeed, the U.S., U.K. and even France have found Rwanda to be a useful ally in Africa. Rwanda provides peacekeepers and military security for various projects, so Westerners turn a blind eye when Rwanda engages in an illegal, extractivist agenda in Congo, thereby undermining the Western “liberal order.” Western officials’ cognitive dissonance over Rwanda’s contradictory behavior is reconciled by their insistence on Rwanda’s “unique security needs.”
As with Israel, the “never again” approach results in population displacement and hundreds of thousands of casualties. Rwanda also champions a universal anti-genocide position. But its ambiguous treatment of ethnic identity raises the question of who is included in Rwanda’s protective umbrella. While the regime officially banned references to ethnicity in the aftermath of the genocide, it lingers on in official commemorations and has become more pronounced since the advent of the latest fighting.
For example, the Kigali Genocide Memorial refers to “the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda” despite the ban, as do other official government documents. In addition, while assiduously avoiding ethnic terms to refer to the situation in Rwanda, Kagame explicitly invokes a regional Tutsi identity to justify Rwanda’s involvement, and he regularly deploys ethnically coded terms — M23 to refer to the Tutsi forces and the FDLR or the Interahamwe for Hutu militias — to describe the main belligerents. This turn supports the regime’s regional foreign policy that entails a de facto Tutsi political takeover of much of eastern Congo, even as Kagame disavows that this is the intent.
Small States As Models For Big Ones
It might be tempting to dismiss the actions of small states like Rwanda or Israel as ancillary to the geopolitical doctrines of the world’s great political powers. Both states are usually presented as unique cases of nation-states defined by their historic victimization. But in fact, Israel and Rwanda have become models for how to use past suffering to justify present-day expansionism.
The historical memorialization of their people’s mass murder provides a rationale for Israel and Rwanda to dominate or occupy peoples who had nothing to do with the mass atrocities that Jews and Rwandans experienced in the past. Both Moscow and Washington now explicitly echo the expansionist logics of Kigali and Jerusalem that Washington, in particular, had only implicitly countenanced in the past.
As the postwar geopolitical order implodes, numerous countries around the world could revive dormant territorial claims, further destabilizing international society. China, for example, has claims not only on Taiwan but also on the Primorsky Krai region of Siberia, which was only ceded to Russia in 1860 under what the Chinese deem an “unequal treaty” and is home to increasing numbers of ethnic Chinese. Nurturing its “Greater Serbia” ambitions, Belgrade continues to claim Kosovo and other parts of former Yugoslavia. Hungary has never come to terms with the drastic loss of territory to Romania in the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. If Somalia reunifies, it is likely to renew its designs on eastern Ethiopia. Even in the Americas, where borders have long been stable, Venezuela claims most of Guyana, Guatemala claims southern Belize and Argentina still longs for the U.K.-controlled Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands). And since Partition in 1947, Pakistan has never stopped insisting that Kashmiris can only be safe if they are ruled from Islamabad. In the most recent round of conflict between India and Pakistan, both sides traded accusations of genocide as a cover for territorial ambitions.
“Israel and Rwanda have become models for how to use past suffering to justify present-day expansionism.”
A new humanitarian justification for annexation may help with these ambitions. According to the Israeli and Rwandan playbook, the maneuver begins with a claim to cultural or civilizational kinship in a given space, followed by a claim that anyone who contests that first claim (even passively, for example, by happening to already live in the claimed territory) represents an “existential” threat that must be removed.
This latter claim is of course easier to make for peoples who have in fact experienced a genocide, like Israel and Rwanda. But the absence of such a historical experience is no real barrier in today’s information environment, where leaders can invent a narrative of existential demographic threat, whether that is the “Great Replacement Theory” or pointing to “LGBTQ ideology” as responsible for a decline in birthrates.
Whether state leaders actually believe such rationalizations is beside the point. There are always rival coalitions of actors in a government, with some believing in a norm and others just using it as cover. The fact is that they are fused: States refer to experiences of past suffering to argue that they possess “unique security interests” that license the meddling in or annexation of neighboring territory.
There is no tension between, on the one hand, Russia’s position that its invasion of Ukraine is justified as a mission to protect Ukrainian Russians from a neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, and on the other its geopolitical vision to reshape the international order, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Russia wants to “protect” “Russians.” In that sense, the atrocity prevention norm at the heart of the post-Cold War order has become an active ingredient dissolving that order.
