At an academic conference, a seasoned European researcher was presenting her (well-funded) project.

The subject was the investigation of mass graves in regions where massacres had taken place, locating them, and recovering wherever possible the number and the identities of the victims. The researcher described the conditions faced by those working in Syria, Kosovo, Egypt, and elsewhere. As is well known, such projects depend on local researchers drawn from the population of the country where the graves lie. These people are vital. And often they put their careers, sometimes their lives, at risk.

So we asked a question. The institutions that are supposed to protect these people, the UN, the EU, NGOs, the Western states that fund the work, have plainly shown their impotence. While journalists and local researchers were being killed in Gaza, while the majority of independent experts were calling what was happening a genocide, these institutions stayed silent, or were dragged into complicity. In such a climate, how can field researchers feel safe? When the protective mechanisms have collapsed, how can you offer them any guarantee?

In the first part of his answer, the researcher noted that the risks vary with the posture of the governments involved, that the Syrian government, for instance, is now itself trying to locate the graves in the country, which makes the work easier.

But the caveat that came at the end of his answer took us aback: "We must be careful about what counts as a war crime, what is to be called a genocide, and we must wait for expert opinion."

This answer is, in truth, an abdication of responsibility dressed up as prudence.

You are the expert.

You are the jurist.

You are the academic.

What more are you waiting for?

People enter the academy for all sorts of reasons. Idealism, status, the pleasure of being listened to, the craving to feel "clever." Some are swept into it by chance, some pursue it deliberately. None of that matters much. What matters is this: at some point, you chose it.

And if you no longer believe in what the profession asks of you, you can unmake that choice. The door is open. You are not obliged to stay.

Academics working in human rights and humanitarian law, especially, will tell you without hesitation that their work carries a moral obligation. They truly believe it. They declare it at conferences, write it into grant applications, instil it in their students. This sense of obligation is part of their professional persona. You cannot separate their titles from the responsibility those titles imply.

So what happens when the hard moment arrives? When the question is no longer theoretical, when people are dying, institutions are collapsing, legal and moral frameworks are visibly disintegrating, why is the answer from the seasoned expert still "let us wait"?

These are people with decades of accumulated standing, with institutional backing, recognised by their peers. Yet faced with a question that demands a clear answer, they take refuge in a procedural helplessness. "We need more expert opinion!" "We have to define our terms!" "We must wait!"

Academics of this kind learn best after the fact!

That is, after the massacres are over.

After the graves have already been dug.

Then comes the time for examining the past: the conference paper, the book, the article that dissects what happened in carefully annotated detail. The ornate reconstruction of the catastrophe, from a safe distance.

No risk. No cost.

You do not have to be an academic. But if you are one, if you have built your career on the idea that knowledge carries responsibility, that expertise serves a purpose greater than the expert himself, then the least you owe to the people in those mass graves, and to those still trying to bring them out, is to be able to give a clear and direct answer when one is needed.