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  • On The Fourth Anniversary of the Syrian Civil War: A Case for Prevention

    The fourth anniversary of the Syrian civil war is this week, and the statistics showing the human toll of the conflict are bleak. Nine children are killed in Syria every day. 6-percent of the population has been killed, maimed, or wounded. Life expectancy has fallen by 27-percent, from 75.9 years to 55.7 years. And 3.3 million Syrians have fled and are living as refugees in neighboring countries; 7.6 million people are internally displaced.

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  • Why More Mass Killings in 2013, and What It Portends for This Year

    In a recent post, I noted that 2013 had distinguished itself in a dismal way, by producing more new episodes of mass killing than any other year since the early 1990s. Now let’s talk about why. Each of these mass killings surely involves some unique and specific local processes, and people who study in depth the societies where mass killings are occurring can say much better than I what those are. As someone who believes local politics is always embedded in a global system, however, I don’t think we can fully understand these situations by considering only those idiosyncratic features, either. Sometimes we see “clusters” where they aren’t, but evidence that we live in a global system leads me to think that isn’t what’s happening here.

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  • Does the United States Have a “Responsibility to Protect” the Syrian People?

    It’s hard to see how the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) would not apply in the case of Syria, where more than 100,000 people have been killed, five million displaced from their homes, two million refugees sent fleeing, and numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed, including with chemical weapons, according to independent human rights monitors and the UN. Yet there is one person who has studiously avoided invoking R2P: President Obama.

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  • World Refugee Day 2013: Eye on Syria

    Today, June 20, marks World Refugee Day 2013, an annual United Nations-designated opportunity to raise awareness of the plight of those displaced due to war, conflict, or persecution throughout the world.

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  • Is Genocide in Syria’s Future?

    In June 2012, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum expressed grave concern about the escalating violence in Syria and warned that the increasingly sectarian nature of that violence could, if unchecked, lead to genocide.

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  • Sectarian Tensions Rising in Syria

    As the war between the Assad regime and rebel forces continues, rising sectarian tensions are leading to more actors taking up arms, according to a report released by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The periodic updates from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria paint a troubling picture of self-defense groups arising within Christian, Alawite Muslim, and other minority groups inside the country. The report describes clashes in areas formerly controlled by the government between rebel groups and armed "Popular Committees." These committees are formed by those minority groups—sometimes with direct government support—who are worried that the rebels will not protect their communities may take reprisal steps against them. In addition, it notes that newly forming rebel factions are increasingly resistant to positioning themselves under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army.  

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Country Case Studies
Country Case Studies

Find information on historical cases of genocide and other atrocities.