Today, I want to share an article with you by my friend Eileen Lawless. Eileen served as a Democracy, Human Rights, Governance, Peace, and Security Advisor at USAID. She saw first hand what it means to invest in peace instead of war.
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Preserving Options for a Future We Cannot Predict
By Eileen Lawless
I was scrolling through my feed a few weeks ago when I stopped at a post that made me catch my breath. The White Helmets, now operating as Truth Guardians, had signed a memorandum of understanding with Syria’s National Commission for Transitional Justice to integrate their documentation of war crimes and crimes against humanity into the country’s formal evidentiary framework. The people who volunteered to pull the bodies of their neighbors from rubble are now helping build the legal foundation for justice in a new Syria.
The announcement crystallized something I had been thinking about for months.
There is a growing tendency to dismiss international law and accountability mechanisms as irrelevant because they so often fail to prevent atrocities or hold powerful actors to account. Others argue that the framework struggles to address conflicts involving violent non-state actors, placing legal obligations on states that extremist organizations routinely ignore. These critiques are understandable. International law has always operated within political and practical constraints, and its application has become increasingly complicated as modern conflicts involve both states and transnational armed groups.
What I question is not the critique of international law itself, but the conclusion that follows from it.
The conclusion assumes that the principal purpose of international law is to prevent atrocities. When atrocities occur despite legal norms, it is taken as evidence that the system has failed and that documenting abuses has become an increasingly futile exercise.
I think that is too narrow a way to understand what documentation is for.
I spent two years working alongside the White Helmets with a small, creative team of colleagues. Together, we initiated one of the first direct USAID awards to a local organization operating in an active war zone. It was a $30 million award for lifesaving emergency response in northwest Syria, including women’s health services, after the Assad regime systematically targeted and destroyed hospitals, health facilities, and labor and delivery wards across Syria.
The funding I think about most, however, was much smaller. Roughly $2 million that my colleagues and I assembled through multiple competitive application processes. That funding supported the White Helmets’ documentation of human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law.
At the time, there was no realistic expectation that the documentation would soon become part of a formal accountability process. This was 2022 and 2023. Bashar al-Assad remained firmly in power. More than half a million people had been killed since 2011. Entire cities had been reduced to rubble. Violations were visible, widely reported, and seemingly without consequence.
We funded the documentation effort anyway because we understood something simple. If an opportunity for accountability ever emerged, it would be too late to document those crimes after the fact.
That decision had little to do with confidence in existing institutions. It had everything to do with preserving future possibilities.
The common criticism that international law applies only to the weak has enough truth in it to be taken seriously. What I think that criticism overlooks is that it treats today’s distribution of power as if it were permanent. Political orders change, regimes fall, alliances shift, institutions evolve, and new opportunities for accountability emerge in ways that are often impossible to predict.
By choosing not to document abuses because accountability appears impossible today, we eliminate future options based on a present-day assumption that may prove wrong. None of us knew whether political conditions would change in Syria. We did know that if we failed to document those crimes while they were occurring, no future court, truth commission, reparations program, or historical inquiry would be able to rely on evidence that had never been collected.
History offers this lesson repeatedly.
In Bosnia, years of documentation by local organizations, journalists, and international monitors became the foundation for prosecutions before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, even though accountability appeared impossibly distant when the photographs were taken and the testimonies were recorded.
In Argentina, families of the disappeared documented abuses throughout the military dictatorship and preserved evidence for years before prosecutions became possible. Those efforts stalled, only to resume decades later as political conditions changed.
The lesson is not that accountability always arrives. It plainly does not. Nor is it that international institutions consistently function as intended. They do not. The lesson is that opportunities for accountability often emerge long after the abuses themselves, and when they do, they depend upon evidence preserved by people who had no way of knowing whether their work would matter or when it might.
That principle extends well beyond criminal prosecutions. Documentation supports truth commissions, reparations programs, institutional reform, historical scholarship, and efforts to counter denial. It establishes an accurate factual record. It acknowledges victims. It makes it more difficult for future generations to erase, deny, or distort what occurred. Even where criminal accountability never materializes, documenting atrocities and preserving evidence serves important public purposes.
I think about those months spent securing funding for the White Helmets’ documentation work. It required explaining, repeatedly, why preserving evidence of human rights abuses was worth investing in when the impact was uncertain and impossible to promise. At the time, it felt like a small contribution against an overwhelming catastrophe.
Today, some of that documentation is becoming part of Syria’s own effort to establish facts and support a process of transitional justice. That does not mean justice is complete, nor does it suggest that the international accountability system suddenly worked as intended. It does mean that when an unexpected political opening emerged, documented evidence was available to support at least an attempt at justice.
The broader lesson extends beyond Syria. Decisions about documentation are always made in the present, under conditions of deep uncertainty and in the face of seemingly overwhelming power. Precisely because we cannot predict when political conditions will change, documenting atrocities and preserving evidence becomes even more important. Today’s seemingly immovable regime may not remain so forever. Today’s impossible political transition may become tomorrow’s reality. The opportunity for accountability may come through a court, a truth commission, a reparations process, institutional reform, or simply through an accurate historical record. We cannot know in advance which path, if any, will emerge.
What we do know is that evidence that is never collected cannot be recovered later. By choosing not to document abuses because accountability appears impossible today, we eliminate future options based on a present-day assumption that may prove wrong.
We cannot control when openings for accountability emerge. We can control whether the evidence exists when they do.
That is why the record is not optional.
****This essay reflects my own experience and perspective. The work itself belonged to many people, especially the extraordinary Syrian volunteers and professionals who risked their lives every day and who continue to help shape Syria’s future through their commitment to truth, justice, and public service.****
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