Crises that involve mass atrocities are contentious issues for foreign policy making, because any policy taken towards them – whether action or inaction – has severe consequences. Dis-courses about such crises often feature historical analogies legitimising military intervention. These analogies provide strong justifications for the use of force by pointing to consequences of non-intervention. However, it is not apparent how historical analogies come to be important in foreign policy discourses and how such analogies come to signify that military intervention is the appropriate solution for situations featuring mass atrocities. To address this issue, the thesis analyses two public discourses about crises involving mass atrocities – the U.S. discourse on the conflict in Darfur beginning in 2003 and the German discourse on the conflict in Kosovo beginning in 1998. Deploying a qualitative content analysis, the analysis utilizes framing theory to identify how historical analogies and other frames were used to legitimize military intervention and which analogies were most prominent in both cases. To understand how these analogies emerged powerful frames, the thesis employs discourse analysis to uncover the process of meaning-making that constructed the two most significant analogies – in Germany to the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica and to the 1994 Rwandan genocide in the U.S. Particular attention is paid to the formation of the representations regarding these particular events in the years before they were used as analogies to categorize and shape re-sponses to the crises in Darfur and Kosovo. Using British Cultural Studies and post-structuralists approaches in IR, the thesis shows that frames containing historical analogies draw on culturally constructed representations of historic events. In forming part of the ‘discursive opportunity structure’, such representations are ren-dered dominant interpretations of historic events in a particular society through processes of discursive meaning-making – and in turn enable the powerful arguments for military interven-tion that they produce when used as analogies.