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Genocide Prevention

Announcements and Recent Analysis

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  • Atrocities Early Warning Q&A: Simona Cruciani

    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.

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  • What Makes Good Forecasters

    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),

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  • Crisis in Haiti

    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,

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  • As Burundi's Elections Approach, Is Mass Killing Likely?

    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.

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  • Beyond the Canon: New UN Tool Suggests Broader Base for Thinking about Atrocity Prevention

    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]. 

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  • A Progress Report on Peace Talks in Colombia

    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.

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  • Shifting Risks in Burkina Faso

    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.

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  • Ebola's Potential Effects on the Risk of Mass Atrocities in Guinea

    One of the countries hit hardest by this year's Ebola epidemic, Guinea, is also one of the countries most susceptible to an onset of state-led mass killing, according to our statistical risk assessments. This conjunction is not entirely accidental. And, while the Ebola epidemic almost certainly won’t lead directly to mass atrocities, the effects the epidemic is having on Guinea’s political economy could indirectly increase that risk in coming months.

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Country Case Studies
Country Case Studies

Find information on historical cases of genocide and other atrocities.