The past year has shown how dramatically things can change around the world and without an inkling that they would. Few could have predicted that a fruit stand vendor's act of defiance in Tunisia could set off uprisings among millions of people across the region.

But the Arab Awakening has given rise to a new kind of concern, equally as unpredictable. Experts fear that the turmoil and uncertainty across the Middle East and North Africa and elsewhere could trigger the kinds of mass atrocities seen in 1990s in places like the Balkans and Rwanda, when the U.S. government and international community was ill-prepared to manage or stop such widespread violence.

Today, experts and policymakers see the issue differently. The U.S. government is taking an approach that aims to do careful planning for the civilian-military community on how to confront the myriad challenges a contemporary mass atrocity would pose, and inculcate ways to surmount them into the civilians who would be giving policy direction to the military. But the effort is also all about how to prevent such atrocities in the first place.

"The U.S. government and the international community recognize that mass atrocities are easier to prevent than to stop," says Bill Corbett, a supervisory special agent with the FBI's Genocide War Crimes Unit.

Corbett participated in a "tabletop exercise" hosted by the United States Institute of Peace's Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding, the Army's Fort Leavenworth Mission Command Training Center and the Army War College's Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute in June that was designed to help government actors work together to respond to a mass atrocity. But prevention is the key, he says.

Prevention is Key

"There are early warnings and indicators and opportunities to disrupt these mass atrocities if you are focused on them," he says. "You look back and there are all these diplomatic, political and security levers you can pull upstream from the violence."

In the 1990s, dark episodes such as those that played out in Bosnia and Rwanda were seen as aberrations. None of the kind of planning it would take to respond effectively to any of them had ever been done.

"Everyone was sort of holding their breath and hoping it would go away," says Sara Sewell, an expert in mass atrocities and an advisor to the exercise, recalling the crises at the time.

"We were muddling through, Rwanda, Bosnia, and people missed the signals for Rwanda completely," says Sewell.

With Kosovo, she says, the international community pre-empted the potential for mass atrocity with an effective air campaign. But prevention was more times than not seen as an ad hoc affair.

Then in 2008, USIP hosted the Genocide Prevention Task Force, an effort many considered the foundation for a presidential directive issued under President Barack Obama three years later in August 2011.  "PSD-10," as it is known, dramatically elevated the issue of genocide prevention and response, making it not only a moral issue, but one of national security as well.

"Sixty-six years since the Holocaust and 17 years after Rwanda, the United States still lacks a comprehensive policy framework and a corresponding interagency mechanism for preventing and responding to mass atrocities and genocide. This has left us ill prepared to engage early, proactively, and decisively to prevent threats from evolving into large scale civilian atrocities," according to the directive.

But it was the linking it to national security helped bring it to the fore.

"Prevention of genocide is not only morally important and morally sound, but it is also in the national security interests of the United States," says Abiodun Williams, acting senior vice president of USIP's Center for Conflict Management. You have to bring both the moral argument and the national security argument together," he says.

The Whole-of-Community Approach to Prevention

The effort underway by the U.S. government, with help by actors such as USIP, means assessing the capacity of not only the so-called whole-of-government, but the whole of community as well, to include nongovernment organizations and other actors. Once a strong policy direction is determined, the military can follow it. It's an endeavor that requires training and education as well as changing the mindset of policymakers who in some cases see less relevancy in words like "mass atrocity" and "genocide" that to some seem dated.

But as the military has changed the way it prepares for different scenarios, it became clear it must adopt a new way of planning for mass atrocities, as well.

"We have to have a different way of training now," says Scott Wuestner of the Combined Arms Center at Leavenworth.

But to experts focused on the issue, the problems around the world today spark fear that the U.S. is again not prepared. Syria, for example, suggests many of the indicators experts look for when it comes to assessing the potential for genocide.

"You just don't know where and when you might be engaging in this," Sewell says.

President Obama on July 10 honored victims of the July 1995 Bosnian genocide, when Serbian forces laid siege to Srebrenica, separated women from the groups they encountered, and summarily executed 8,372 men and boys. It was a fresh reminder of the collective pain these incidents incur.

"The name Srebrenica will forever be associated with some of the darkest acts of the 20th century," Obama said, adding that the U.S. "rejects efforts to distort the scope of this atrocity, rationalize the motivations behind it, blame the victims, and deny the indisputable fact that it was genocide."

And Prime Minister David Cameron said the genocide that unfolded there should never be forgotten or denied and called on the world to "prevent such atrocities from taking place."

Those public remarks punctuated the effort underway today.

Tabletop Exercise

The tabletop exercise in June at USIP brought together key government agencies, from State, Defense, Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and others to begin to address in greater detail how to prevent such atrocities. The exercise was also held in conjunction with III Corps in Fort Hood, Texas, which had begun a combat exercise, a simulation that turned into a mass atrocities situation, for which they turned to the tabletop exercise at USIP for help.

These kinds of exercises are critical, says USIP’s Van Metre, because while preparation is key, neither the civilian community nor the military community can prepare in isolation.

The "Mass Atrocity Prevention and Response Options Tabletop Exercise," held June 12 and 13 at USIP, was designed to "build whole of government relationships" and "improve understanding and coordination between agencies."

The exercise was designed to build relationships between agencies and help participants become more comfortable with planning for a potential mass atrocity in the fictional country of Atropia. The first day of the exercise focused on preventing genocide; the second forced participants to manage the aftermath of an actual event.

"Perhaps the most important part of this exercise was having the interagency teams wrestle with a situation on the ground where U.S. troops were finding themselves facing a badly deteriorating situation – the conflict they were responding to was rapidly becoming a mass atrocities situation," says Lauren Van Metre, dean of students for USIP's Academy. "We know from Rwanda and from Srebrenica that military units do get caught, and they need rapid and effective political guidance," she says. These kinds of exercises are critical, she says, because while preparation is key, neither the civilian community nor the military community can prepare in isolation. Dwight Raymond, another expert in the field who co-authored "Mass Atrocity Response Operations: A Military Planning Handbook," and who assisted with the exercise, says it forces civilian policymakers to grapple more substantively with how to work together and plan.

"It's an exercise to actually wrestle with the problem," he said.

Creating effective genocide prevention and response policy means making sure the government works well together, says Corbett of the FBI, whose department sent forensic teams to Kosovo to help investigate mass graves or anywhere else where American citizens are victims of mass atrocities.

"This recognition in the whole-of-government, this interagency, instruments of national power – it really is an all hands effort trying to get at this problem set," he says.