Announcements and Recent Analysis

Page 29 of 48

Watch Experts’ Beliefs Evolve Over Time: South Sudan Conflict
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.
Will Unarmed Civilians Soon Get Massacred in Ukraine?
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).
What the U.S. Intelligence Community Says About Mass Atrocities in 2014
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...
A Countryside of Concentration Camps
New Republic correspondent Graeme Wood provides a vivid account of his recent trip to Burma, which he undertook with support from the Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide.
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- burma
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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Central African Republic: The Path to Mass Atrocities
This review tracks the major events over the past ten years in the lead-up to the current crisis, and examines the response of the international community.
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- humanitarian update
- central african republic
Museum Launches Initiative to Examine International Responses to Genocide
The Museum has released previously unpublished material about a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the 1994 Rwandan genocide as part of new project that examines the massive failure of the international community to stop one of the most horrifying and brutal episodes of mass violence that the world has seen since the Holocaust.
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Why the Central African Republic Crisis Is a Security Problem for the US
In an article for Defense One, Madeleine K. Albright, former Secretary of State and co-chair of the Museum–co-sponsored Working Group on the Responsibility to Protect, discusses the steps taken by the Obama administration to address the situation in the Central African Republic, outlines why atrocities perpetrated in the heart of Africa are important to the strategic interests and moral values of the United States, and why the “responsibility to protect” is applicable here.
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- central african republic
Museum Statement on Violence in South Sudan
The Museum expresses grave concern over reports that members of ethnic groups are being targeted for killing in South Sudan and warned of the potential for catastrophic violence if leaders of the country do not act quickly to contain their supporters.
The Fog of War is Patchy
Over at Foreign Policy‘s Peace Channel, Sheldon Himmelfarb of USIP has a new post arguing that better communications technologies in the hands of motivated people now give us unprecedented access to information from ongoing armed conflicts.

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