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Will the UN Human Rights Council Adopt a Resolution on Sri Lanka?
March 15, 2014
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.
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States Aren’t the Only Mass Killers
March 7, 2014
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.
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Watch Experts’ Beliefs Evolve Over Time: South Sudan Conflict
February 5, 2014
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.
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Will Unarmed Civilians Soon Get Massacred in Ukraine?
January 31, 2014
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).
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What the U.S. Intelligence Community Says About Mass Atrocities in 2014
January 29, 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...
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A Countryside of Concentration Camps
January 23, 2014
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
January 13, 2014
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
January 13, 2014
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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Museum Launches Initiative to Examine International Responses to Genocide
January 9, 2014
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
January 3, 2014
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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Country Case Studies
Find information on historical cases of genocide and other atrocities.