The 25th Anniversary of the Genocide at Srebrenica is a solemn occasion --- one on which Bosnians and the international community contemplate the scars left by that event. Many of those scars are personal, but some are also institutional, or systemic. Indeed, the genocide at Srebrenica left the international community – especially, but not only, the United Nations – with a legacy it must confront in the wake of its failure.

My goal here is to assess the outcome of that implicit promise, asking what has been done to prevent such horrors from recurring, and have those steps been effective?

Global efforts to reckon with the United Nations – and, more broadly, the international community’s – failures in Bosnia, as well as those in Rwanda in 1994 have two major components.