Canada’s Human-Rights-Based Responses to Peacebuilding Efforts in the Context of Mass Atrocity

This chapter takes a critical look at Canada’s inconsistent and sometimes contradictory efforts to support the human rights and peacebuilding nexus in the context of mass atrocity crimes. Drawing on specific case studies from the end of the Cold War to the present, the chapter will focus primarily on Canada’s normative, diplomatic, military, and financial contributions to human rights and peacebuilding, while situating those efforts within the larger political contexts of the times, including the systematic undermining of international human rights and humanitarian law in the early years of the US-led Global War on Terror, the emergence of transnational right-wing populism and xenophobia as a mainstream political force, and the rise of great power rivalries. The chapter advances the argument that Canada’s ability to make meaningful contributions to the nexus is directly linked to the vibrancy of a rules-based international order that reached its apex in the late 1990s and has been in steady decline ever since.