(somber music)
- [Narrator] Mention of mass atrocities,
including genocide, leads many to think
about large-scale mass killings
directed against ordinary people,
which seemingly erupt out of nowhere.
These events are often publicized
after extreme violence and significant deaths
have already occurred,
leaving us to think that mass atrocities are inevitable.
Scholarship, however, has documented
that mass atrocities rarely emerge without warning.
They're the result of a culmination
of identifiable and detectable macro-level risk factors,
warning signs, and triggers.
- I think what our forecasting ability is really good at
is the ability to look at, you know,
190 countries of the world,
and isolate 10 that have the conditions
that make it much more likely
that there's gonna be a mass atrocity event in those places.
This is violence that's intentional,
deliberate, strategic violence.
It takes commitment, it takes organization,
it takes orchestration,
and so that just doesn't happen overnight.
That happens over time.
- [Narrator] An accumulation of risk factors,
warning signs, and triggers can indicate a society
is on a dangerous path.
Moreover, the conditions we associate
with risk and warning signs,
such as tension and polarization,
and impunity for past crimes,
can also persist during and after mass atrocities.
One way to think about risk factors,
warning signs, and triggers
is as the ingredients for a fire.
Risk factors are the underlying conditions: the wood.
Warning signs, intensified conditions,
are similar to gasoline.
And triggers, events that lead
to a sharp escalation in violence,
are like the match that lights the fire.
It's important to note here that no perfect science exists
for predicting mass atrocities, including genocide.
Each case is different,
and has a mix of causes and conditions at play.
Some factors will matter more, or less,
depending on the context,
so it's important to have a deep understanding
of the local environment.
Still, patterns have emerged
through research and studying past mass atrocity events.
- In retrospect, we can go back and find
that a lot of these cases have common factors.
I think what is striking to me
is that many times, people who are in those environments,
even if there are warning signs, don't recognize them.
And one of the things that we observe
in these circumstances, again,
is a process of escalation,
and that happens through condoning, encouragement,
acceptance of violence.
- [Narrator] First, risk factors are the underlying fuel
for the fire: the wood.
These are macro-level conditions
typically measured at the country level.
Some conditions may persist or evolve slowly,
such as population size or national income level,
while others may involve change over a period of time,
such as economic conditions or war.
The mass atrocities that took place in Darfur
illustrate one example of how risk factors
can intersect and lead to mass atrocities.
Between 2003 and 2005,
millions of Darfurians fled their homes,
and at least 200,000 were killed or died
as a result of attacks by Sudanese military forces
and government-backed militias.
In this case, there was an ongoing civil war,
and in Darfur, the exclusionary ideology
of Sudan's ruling party plausibly shaped
the willingness of state elites to pursue violence
against non-Arabs, who were not seen as integral
to the core national community of the state.
There had also been violence previously committed
in the southern area of the country,
with no criminal accountability.
Key risk factors played a role in the case of Darfur:
large scale instability, exclusionary ideology,
prior discrimination, and unpunished violence
against a particular group.
Some macro-level risk factors spark scholarly debate,
in part because these conditions
can occur in places where mass atrocities do not occur.
These include deep-seated hatreds,
government capacity for violence,
authoritarianism, and economic crises.
Warning signs are those factors that appear
just before the onset of mass atrocities.
They can intensify the preexisting macro level risk factors.
They can add fuel to a fire-
they serve as accelerants.
This list is a small subset of warning signs:
tension and polarization among groups,
apocalyptic public rhetoric by leaders,
labeling civilian groups as the enemy,
the development and deployment of irregular armed forces,
stockpiling weapons,
emergency or discriminatory legislation,
removing moderates from leadership or public service,
and lack of punishment for past crimes.
In the case of the Holocaust,
many of these warning signs were present
in the 1930s in Germany,
and built on risk factors in place
from the 1920s and before.
Nazi propaganda amplified existing anti-Jewish attitudes,
and advanced the persecution of the Jews
by painting them as a threat to German society
that needed to be destroyed.
The Nazis passed hundreds of laws
that stripped Jews of their basic human rights,
including restricting their freedom of movement.
The Nazis also established their own paramilitary groups
that contributed to Hitler's rise to power
and anti-Semitic violence during the Nazi period.
- You see a kind of pattern of escalation
against the Jewish population that is not uncommon
in other genocides as well.
It didn't always take exactly that form,
but you see this kind of group-targeted separation,
polarization, discrimination, and violence
prior to the large scale campaigns of violence that occur.
- [Narrator] Finally, triggers are events
that can create a sharp escalation of violence.
Triggers are like lighting a match.
They include events such as a high-level assassination
or an attempted coup,
a change in conflict dynamics,
severe crackdown on civilian protests,
or a symbolically significant attack
against an individual or physical site.
These events alone do not automatically lead to violence,
but in combination with risk factors and warning signs,
the likelihood of violence increases.
Perpetrators may use a trigger,
whether real or fabricated, as a justification for violence
in service of their strategic goals or ideologies.
One example of a trigger can be seen
in the April 1994 case of Rwanda.
On April 6th, the airplane carrying Rwanda's Hutu president,
Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot down.
The individual assassins are not known,
but the interim government leaders
who took control of the state
following the assassination blamed the Tutsi rebels
and began attacks on Tutsi civilians.
In this case, the killing of the president
escalated the ongoing crisis
and weakened the tenuous ceasefire
that had been in place since 1993.
And the genocide against Tutsi civilians was launched.
- Rwanda had many of the risk factors that lead to genocide.
It was in a civil war.
There was a long history of nationalism
that really considered the Tutsi population
as second-class citizens.
There were many warning signs.
There was stockpiling of weapons,
there was the formation of paramilitary groups,
there was changes in rhetoric, and polarization.
You had the killing of the president.
It changed the dynamics of the conflict.
It radicalized many people in Rwanda,
and made them much more willing
to either condone violence, orchestrate violence,
or accept violence against the Tutsi population.
- [Narrator] A common myth is that mass atrocities
happen suddenly and are beyond our control.
In studying mass atrocities, including genocide,
we have learned that they are never spontaneous.
They are always preceded by a range of warning signs.
Early action to minimize these risks
can make prevention programs and policies
more effective and less costly.
For governments and societies at risk of mass atrocities,
early action also increases the ability of leaders
and communities to reduce risk.
The more that we know about mass atrocity risk,
the more likely that opportunities for prevention
can be identified-and communities and lives can be saved.
(somber music)