Past Program

This multi-year project is being developed in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum under the direction of Michael Abramowitz, (Director, Committee on Conscience, USHMM) and seeks to improve the chances that genocide can in future be halted, deterred or otherwise prevented, based on a careful study of international responses to genocidal violence. (Key questions include why past genocides were allowed to happen, how various actors behaved before and during them, and whether different actions by any or all of them would likely have produced a different result.)

We expect to do this through a series of case studies of selected past genocides, during which eyewitnesses, key international actors, and scholars will be asked to take part in in-depth, multi-perspective analyses of the impact that international decision-making had, or could have had, on the perpetrators.

The information assembled in each case study will be used to develop new insights, and the core group managing the project will bring these together in a cumulative analysis, on which current and future policymakers who have to deal with threats of genocide can draw.

Key experts will be involved in this planning meeting to determine the specific case studies that this project will examine and to shape its development.

We expect that the first case study session coming out of this project will be held in Salzburg in 2013.