As one of the 20 countries most likely to experience the start of a new episode of state-led mass killing, according to our statistical risk assessments, Yemen demands our attention. In recent weeks, several countries have shut their embassies in Sanaa, and the UN has continued to warn of the potential for civil war.
Simona Cruciani works on information management, early warning, and risk assessment in the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. She joined the Office in July 2008, after having served in United Nations field operations in Burundi and Sudan. In Burundi, Cruciani served in the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations ONUB as an Electoral and Civil Affairs Officer. In Sudan, she worked as Civil Affairs Officer for UNMIS. Cruciani’s focus has primarily been on supporting human security, democratization and human rights in conflict and post-conflict situations. She owns Master’s Degrees in Contemporary History, International Affairs and Public Health.
The Early Warning Project strives to use the best methods to assess risks of mass atrocities around the world, so we are happy to see a new paper (PDF) from the Good Judgment Project (GJP)—a multi-year, U.S. government-funded forecasting experiment that's set to conclude later this year—getting lots of press coverage this week. As Kelsey Atherton describes for Popular Science (here),
Over the past several months, Haiti has slipped into a political crisis that threatens to get worse in early 2015. As the International Crisis Group summarized in its 1 December 2014 edition of Crisis Watch,
In an effort to shine a light on the largely underreported and forgotten situation in the Nuba Mountain region of Sudan, the Museum worked with award-winning filmmaker Andrew Berends to support the production of Madina’s Dream, a documentary exploring the human dimensions of life in this troubled region.
Human rights groups and the United Nations have been warning that Burundi’s elections in 2015 could spark a genocide, but the Early Warning Project’s risk assessments so far indicate that Burundi is not at especially high risk of state-led mass killing. To explore this discrepancy, I asked a handful of experts for their views on this case. While all of the sources I interviewed agreed that the UN was right to be concerned, they disagreed on how severe the risk is and how a new episode of state-led mass killing might come about.
In a small but meaningful gesture, the photographs on the cover of the UN’s new framework of analysis for assessing the risk of genocide and other mass atrocities go beyond what I call the genocide canon—the cases of Armenia, the Holocaust, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and, of late, Darfur that are typically cited to prick people’s conscience and spur action by policymakers—to include images from East Timor, Guatemala, and Cambodia [see below; captions are on page ii of the document].
Bridget Conley-Zilkic is research director at the World Peace Foundation and assistant professor of research at Tufts University's The Fletcher School. From 2001 to 2011, she worked on issues related to contemporary genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
An article in the Economist, “The Dogs Bark in Colombia,” details the intransigence of both Álvaro Uribe (a former president and the leader of right-wing opposition to the peace talks) and the FARC’s leaders, which has the potential to derail negotiations. Coupled with the slow pace of talks, evidence that elements of the Colombian military have been spying on human rights defenders, journalists, and politicians involved in the peace process, and continued armed confrontations between insurgents and the government, there remain formidable challenges to reaching a peace agreement that would end the conflict. There are, however, some positive developments to report.
The man who ruled Burkina Faso for 27 years fell from office a few days ago, and the contours of the transition that will follow remain unclear. The Early Warning Project's statistical risk assessments suggest that this tumult has roughly doubled the risk of an onset of state-led mass killing in Burkina Faso for the next year or more, likely pushing it into the top 30 when those estimates are next updated in early 2015. The several area experts we consulted in the past 48 hours, however, all indicated that this worst-case scenario was highly unlikely to happen.
Find information on historical cases of genocide and other atrocities.