Iraq’s long-running civil war has spread and intensified again over the past year, and the government’s fight against a swelling Sunni insurgency now threatens to devolve into the sort of indiscriminate reprisals that could produce a new episode of state-led mass killing there. The idea that Iraq could suffer a new wave of mass atrocities at the hands of state security forces or sectarian militias collaborating with them is not far fetched.
Both resolutions commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and call on states to recommit themselves to the prevention of and fight against genocide and other serious atrocity crimes.
Contemporary Rwanda is puzzling because it provokes a polarized reaction. Many observers laud Rwanda as one of Africa’s greatest developmental successes, but others warn that it remains dangerously prone to mass atrocities. In a recent essay for African Arguments on how the Rwandan genocide changed the world, Omar McDoom nicely encapsulates this unusual duality...
A report from Mike Abramowitz, director of the Museum's Center for the Prevention of Genocide, who is in Kigali with a Museum delegation to participate in the 20th anniversary commemorations of the genocide in Rwanda.
In our statistical risk assessments, Chad currently ranks among the 30 countries worldwide at greatest risk of an onset of state-led mass killing. At the same time, our pool of experts has set Chad’s risk at 8 percent, low compared to several other countries in that Top 30. For example, our experts’ current forecasts for Iraq and Pakistan, both in the Top 30, are 22 and 23 percent, respectively, and for Myanmar, 38 percent. Considering the relative instability of Chad’s neighbors and Chad’s history of coups and ethnic conflict, why do our experts see such a low chance of a mass killing episode, and what might change their predictions?
The Early Warning Project’s primary goal is to assess risks of mass atrocities, but our expert opinion pool lets us glean insights into related issues, too. For example, we can ask experts to predict how international institutions, such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court, will respond when atrocities occur. Right now, we’re asking our experts to consider whether or not the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) will adopt a resolution concerning Sri Lanka during its 25th regular session, which began this week and ends March 28.
We tend to think of mass killing as something that states do, but states do not have a monopoly on this use of force. Many groups employ violence in an attempt to further their political and economic agendas; civilians often suffer the consequences of that violence, and sometimes that suffering reaches breathtaking scale.
On 15 December 2013, “something“ happened in South Sudan that quickly began to spiral into a wider conflict. Prior research tells us that mass killings often occur on the heels of coup attempts and during civil wars, and at the time South Sudan ranked among the world’s countries at greatest risk of state-led mass killing. Motivated by these two facts, I promptly added a question about South Sudan to the opinion pool we’re running as part of a new atrocities early-warning system for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide.
As part of a public atrocities early-warning system I am currently helping to build for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide (see here), we are running a kind of always-on forecasting survey called an opinion pool. An opinion pool is similar in spirit to a prediction market, but instead of having participants trade shares tied the occurrence of some future event, we simply ask participants to estimate the probability of each event’s occurrence. In contrast to a traditional survey, every question remains open until the event occurs or the forecasting window closes. This way, participants can update their forecasts as often as they like, as they see or hear relevant information or just change their minds. With generous support from Inkling, we started up our opinion pool in October, aiming to test and refine it before our larger early-warning system makes its public debut this spring (we hope).
Here’s what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said about the risk of mass atrocities this year in the Worldwide Threat Assessment he delivered today to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence...
Find information on historical cases of genocide and other atrocities.
