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Genocide Prevention

Announcements and Recent Analysis

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  • 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).

  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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.

  • Sixty-Five Years Later: The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide

    Sixty-five years ago today, in the wake of the Holocaust, the UN General Assembly adopted its first-ever human rights treaty. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide obliges signatories to prevent genocide—defined as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group—and to punish the perpetrators when it occurs. 

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Country Case Studies
Country Case Studies

Find information on historical cases of genocide and other atrocities.