As I continue to post draft questions from the teaching guide over the coming month, I’m grateful to a few bloggers out there who have agreed to co-host some questions to help get a mix of reader feedback. (If you have a site with readers who you think would be interested in joining the conversation, let me know and I’ll add you into the co-hosting schedule). I’ll be cross-linking to their sites and incorporating some of their reader reactions here for anyone who is interested. As always, feel free to bite off just a segment of the question and apply it to other issues you are working on. Here goes the next question, which UN Dispatch is co-hosting:

In “A Problem from Hell“ Samantha Power argued that it was in the realm of American domestic politics that the battle to stop genocide was lost. Fighting for Darfur suggests that in the case of Darfur, this was not true: Succeeding in capturing the attention of Washington was a necessary but not sufficient condition; global geopolitics were key and in this realm, China’s role was central. Is Power’s theory about the privileged U.S. role in stopping atrocity crimes out of date? Or was Darfur an anomalous case? What does the speed of the international response in Libya suggest? If the American-centric theory is out of date, what does this mean for U.S.-based activists intent on stopping mass atrocity crimes?