Organization Overview & Contents
Mission Statement
Enough is a project of the Center for American Progress to end genocide and crimes against humanity. Founded in 2007, Enough focuses on the crises in Sudan, Chad, eastern Congo, northern Uganda, Somalia, and Zimbabwe. Enoughs strategy papers and briefings provide sharp field analysis and targeted policy recommendations based on a “3P” crisis response strategy: promoting durable peace, providing civilian protection, and punishing perpetrators of atrocities. Enough works with concerned citizens, advocates, and policy makers to prevent, mitigate, and resolve these crises.
About Us
The Enough Project is helping to build a permanent constituency to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity. Too often, the United States and the larger international community have taken a wait-and-see approach to crimes against humanity. This is unconscionable. Genocide and war crimes are not inevitable, and we at Enough want to create noise and action both to stop ongoing atrocities and to prevent their recurrence. Our mission is to help people from every walk of life understand the practical actions they can take to make a difference. Our strategy is to energize diverse communities – including students, religious groups, activists, business leaders, celebrities, and Diaspora networks – to ensure that their voices are heard on some of the most pressing foreign policy and moral challenges facing the world today.
Enough was conceived in 2006 by a small group of concerned policymakers and activists who wanted to transform their frustration about inaction into pragmatic solutions and hope. Co-founded by Africa experts Gayle Smith and John Prendergast, Enough launched in early 2007 as project of the Center for American Progress. John Norris is Enough’s Executive Director.
Enough conducts intensive field research in countries plagued by genocide and crimes against humanity, develops practical policies to address these crises, and shares sensible tools to help empower citizens and groups working for change. Our initial work has focused on grave challenges in a number of African countries: Sudan, eastern Congo, northern Uganda, Somalia, Chad and Zimbabwe.
In framing its policy prescriptions, Enough utilizes a “3P” approach: promoting peace, protecting civilians, and punishing perpetrators. Enough also focuses on a fourth and all-encompassing “P,” prevention, and is working to develop the policies, tools, and investments that can best be brought to bear to prevent crimes against humanity and genocide now and in the future.
Why Enough?
Genocide and ware crimes are not inevitable. Enough wants to create noise and action to prevent such atrocities from taking place. It is our mission to help people understand, in very practical ways, how they can make a difference.
Our strategy is to energize diverse communities – including religious groups, students, community organizations, business leaders, athletes, performers, Diaspora networks, and activists for human rights and peace – to ensure that their voices are heard on some of the most pressing foreign policy and moral challenges in the world today. We focus on the policies, tools, and investments that can be brought to bear to prevent crimes against humanity and genocide now and in the future. Despite remarkable changes in the world since the end of the Cold War, mass atrocities against civilians have remained a sad reality of the modern world. From ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, to the Rwandan genocide, to the horrors of today’s Darfur, the international community has repeatedly failed to take action when it was needed the most. Enough was founded to help galvanize the public and political leaders to effectively confront mass violence against innocent civilians. Enough is built around three core beliefs:
- Information is Power: We provide concerned citizens, the media and political leaders with high quality reporting and analysis from the field in real time and offer practical solutions to help change the situation on the ground.
- Foreign Policy is not Foreign. There are actions that you can take no matter where you live that will help end atrocities taking place right now half the world away. You have more power to change policy than you ever imagined.
- People make a Difference. Our long-term goal is to strengthen and sustain a broadbased grassroots network of people from all walks of life who are informed and ready to raise the cry when mass atrocities are in danger of occurring. Never believe anyone who says: “Nothing can be done.”
Why Enough Focuses on Africa
At first glance, the reason for Enough’s focus on Africa is obvious: Africa has been home to more than its share of mass atrocities – in Sudan, in Uganda, in the Congo, in Liberia and Sierra Leone, in Mozambique and Angola and South Africa. But Africa is also the place where change is starting to happen. In the 1980s, Mozambique was widely regarded as Africa’s worst basket case.
RENAMO rebels backed by the apartheid regime in South Africa ran rampant, slaughtering innocent civilians, maiming children, raping women and terrorizing civilians in the midst of a brutal civil war. Most concluded that there was no hope; Mozambique’s was an intractable crisis.Today, Mozambique is one of the most peaceful countries on the continent, is an emerging democracy, and is registering one of the fastest rates of growth in the world.
Sierra Leone – a country once beset by a predatory movement that hacked off the limbs of its victims – is now embarking on a fragile but steady path to peace. Liberia, where chaos and killing defined the lives of a generation, is rebuilding, and its former ruler – the dictator Charles Taylor – is in custody and awaiting trial. Once defined by the brutality of massacres in Soweto, South Africa is today a leader in Africa and a model for the world – the example we all point to when we talk about what is possible. Rwanda, where one million people were killed in 100 days of genocide 1994, is now a largely peaceful nation where 55 percent of its parliamentary seats are held by women.
Enough’s 3-P Strategy
Although every situation demands a unique and flexible policy, effective strategies to avert mass atrocities will nearly always follow a basic three track approach: protecting civilians; forging a durable peace process; and, punishing perpetrators. Pursued concurrently, and calibrated appropriately, these “three Ps” of peacemaking, protection, and punishment -- can achieve the immediate goal of ending mass atrocities in a given country while helping prevent similar crimes from recurring elsewhere in the future.
- Peacemaking: Creating and supporting processes that address the underlying causes of conflicts and improve the opportunity for sustainable peace, while devoting the necessary resources to ensure the successful implementation of peace processes.
- Protection: The prudent application of force to provide security for civilians impacted by conflict; the provision of humanitarian assistance to save lives and alleviate suffering.
- Punishment – or “make them pay”: The perpetrators of mass atrocities and genocides must be named, shamed, and held accountable by the U.S. and the international community through punitive measures such as targeted sanctions against the perpetrators of atrocities, mechanisms to prosecute those responsible for these crimes, restricting the material resources that fuel conflict, or divestment from business interests that support and enable human rights violators. Moreover, those responsible for crimes against humanity must face legal consequences, either through their domestic courts or an international mechanism such as the International Criminal Court.
From Strategy to Action
To address the 3 Ps, Enough energizes diverse communities to ensure that their voices are heard on some of the most pressing foreign policy and moral challenges in the world today. Since its founding, Enough has been on a strong trajectory involving activities along three tracks:
- Analysis: Enough provides unparalleled field research and analysis based on the 3Ps, as well as new thinking on long-term structural changes to grassroots and “grass tops” constituents to enhance their ability to make smart decisions in the immediate and longer-term. This analysis is provided through a range of tailored products and activities, including in-depth strategy reports; timely field reports; short but substantive strategy briefings or memos tailored to legislators or advocates, and a range of media and communications materials, including op-eds, press releases, blogposts, and web-based video.
- Advocacy: Enough promotes the implementation of the 3Ps and longer-term structural measures by including, in each report, substantive policy recommendations and then using these to provide an “intel chip” to the movement, thus deepening the analysis used by a broad range of groups and constituencies. Enough has established a process to repurpose strategy reports for multiple and diverse audiences so that a consistent but tailored message is conveyed to the movement, policymakers, and the media.
- Activism: Enough strives to increase the capacity of activists across the country by recommending or supporting particular actions that will send a clear and substantive signal to decision-makers about the public demand for action on mass atrocities. As well, Enough has developed strategic relationships with Save Darfur Coalition (SDC), Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net), STAND, Dream for Darfur, Resolve Uganda, Invisible Children, Congo Global Action, and other groups that allow us to launch Enough products through their pipelines and release coordinated joint-statements. We also initiated regular teleconferences to brief new reports and analyses and develop, with them, the activist “ask” that will resonate with the grassroots and be consistent with the 3P analysis.
For more information, please contact: Eileen White Read, Associate Director of Communications, 202-741-6376 or 202-641-0779; eread@enoughproject.org
The Enough Project of the Center for American Progress
1225 Eye Street NW
Washington, DC 20005.
