This piece addresses some misunderstandings regarding Raphael Lemkin's early years in Poland, his influences and the development of his ideas. While discussing some of the extent published information, I point out what other archival documents from Poland and the League of Nations have to say about Lemkin's past. One of the main points is that Lemkin was an unreliable narrator on his own life, and this has caused confusion.

Global Human Rights Sanctions (GHRS) have been used in over 30 countries as a mechanism for imposing unilateral human rights sanctions on individual perpetrators. Despite the hundreds of specific sanctions that have been imposed globally, there remains a lack of understanding about how these measures function on gross human rights violations. This article seeks to explore how GHRS, as an emerging human rights mechanism, contributes to addressing mass atrocities. I categorize the functions of GHRS into two phases: post-atrocity and pre-atrocity. In the post-atrocity phase, I identify three primary objectives asserted by sanctioning states: punishing perpetrators, promoting behavioral change, and providing compensation to victims. In the pre-atrocity phase, I introduce the Swiss Cheese Model to illustrate the deterrent effect of GHRS, emphasizing their unique role in preventing and addressing mass atrocities compared to other human rights mechanisms.

As transitional justice has grown as a field and as an international mandate in post-atrocity contexts over the past several decades, the memorialization of past atrocities through the construction of physical spaces of memory has increasingly been recognized as an essential aspect of this complex process. Often, these spaces of memory are touted not only as honoring past victims, but also as important tools for preventing future violence. To date, there has yet to emerge a clear way to measure exactly how sites of memory contribute to atrocity prevention. Can a site of memory really help prevent further acts of atrocity violence? If so, when and how are sites of memory a preventive force? This article describes the findings of three years of research into more than 400 memory sites around the world, with a focus on the programming and activities undertaken by various sites not only to engage with the past, but to respond to contemporary risks of large-scale, identity-based violence. This article posits that memory sites can be identified as preventive when they succeed at mitigating or eliminating any of the identifiable risk factors that lead to atrocity.

In this paper, we argue that atrocity prevention (AP) researchers face obstacles to inference and knowledge synthesis in the study of AP strategies and tools. We argue that researchers can begin to address obstacles to inference by using rigorous social-science methods and can address obstacles to knowledge synthesis through greater coordination and transparency about concepts, methods, and data. Our argument proceeds in four parts. First, drawing on a systematic review of three decades of research about AP tools, we survey key analytic obstacles to drawing conclusions about the effects of AP policy. Second, we survey four separate methods that researchers increasingly use to address some of these inferential issues in individual studies. Third, we survey the subsequent obstacles to synthesizing and aggregating conclusions from these studies, despite methodological advances. We conclude by offering recommendations about how researchers can conduct research that would be easier to synthesize across studies and some initial ideas about how analysts can use the existing body of research to inform policy decisions. In particular, we recommend that both researchers and practitioners adopt a “Bayesian approach” to interpreting evidence from the AP literature by thinking in probabilistic terms, using context-specific information about particular cases to refine estimates of the likely outcomes of AP tools based on more general evidence.

Our research question is: Does inter-group horizontal economic inequality elevate state-perpetrated mass atrocity risk? Theoretical perspectives in genocide studies show how economic and other forms of discrimination against ethnic or religious groups can elevate the risk of government violence against them. Among the approximately five dozen large-sample empirical studies of mass atrocity risk, only a few consider the effects of economic discrimination. Moreover, no large-sample empirical studies, to the best of our knowledge, test hypotheses related to how inter-group horizontal economic inequalities (as distinct from vertical economic inequalities based on GINI coefficients or quantile income or wealth measures) affect mass atrocity risk. Drawing upon two data sources, we construct four horizontal economic inequality measures for groups within nations. The measures relate to access to economic resources in general and to electricity in particular. We then empirically test hypotheses related to horizontal economic inequality and mass atrocity risk for a sample of 175 nations spanning the period 1946–2019. We find modest support that horizontal economic inequality elevates mass atrocity risk broadly defined, but not genocide risk. We also find that vertical income inequality measures do not usually elevate mass atrocity or genocide risk.

Scholars are critical of how economists overlook “the questions of genocide,” and of how legislatures have not paid adequate attention to the subject of looting, except in the case of the Armenian genocide. This article, informed by interdisciplinary perspectives, uses government documents, data, and semi-structured interviews to discuss the overlooked triangle of looting, economics, and the Anfal genocide of the Kurds in Iraq. The study refuses to limit itself only to the eight stages of the Anfal genocide that started in 1988, and instead offers data on its preliminary phases which occurred earlier in the 1980s. It then discusses the multidimensional political economy of the Anfal genocide and argues that (a) the legalized plundering of spoils of warby the Ba’ath regime served as a political economic strategy to justify the Anfal genocide; (b) Saddam Hussein utilized economic prospect theory—putting a higher emphasis on imagined gains than on losses—by maximizing revenue and minimizing the cost of the genocide; and (c) Saddam’s use of symbolic religious names and Qur’an verses did not demonstrate his religious commitment, but rather aimed to foster and restore the cultural legacy of looting among ordinary people. The article focuses on rewards, in the form of economic capital earned from looting and confiscations, as goals that aided the effective execution of the Anfal genocide and promoted divisions within urban Kurdish society but that failed to deracinate Kurdish resistance culture.