Case Studies

In some regions of the Amazon basin, especially in parts of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, small ethnolinguistic  groups of forest dwellers are under attack and in some cases threatened with genocide.

While the term ‘genocide’ is a Twentieth Century invention, the phenomenon it describes has been practiced for millennia.   The GSP has examined instances of genocide in Greek and Roman times, respectively.

In the early Twentieth Century, the late-Ottoman Empire political movement called the “Committee of Union and Progress,” (commonly known as ‘the Young Turks’) began to envision a post-Ottoman state that gave primacy to the Turkish identity.  During the first world war, the political project included territorial expansion as well as efforts to destroy non-Turkish minorities in Anatolia.  Upwards of one million Armenians were killed during the course of a forced deportation campaign in 1915.

The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country’s population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century.

In a variety of locations – including Africa, the Americas, Australia, and the British Isles (among others) – colonial policy involved genocidal ambitions and actions.

In the late Twentieth Century, Indonesian efforts to control and incorporate East Timor involved what a UN-sponoored truth commission would come to term “extermination as a crime against humanity.”

Between 1981 and 1983, the Guatemalan military’s anti-insurgency campaign included policies of massacres, forced displacement, and other acts of violence.  Research, some of which was conducted under the auspices of the GSP, illustrats the genocidal nature of this campaign.

Materials and activities that address the genocide against Jews, Roma, and others in Europe during World War II. 

Several episodes of genocide against peoples in Indonesia are explored.

Addresses genocide-related issues not covered by the other “Case Studies” on this web-site.

Research addressing instances of genocide in Papua, Indoneisa (formerly known as West Papua, Irian Jaya, or West Irian).

Long denied full citizenship, he Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Myanmar, faced persecution, ethnic cleansing, and possible genocide in succesive waves of violence throughout the 2010.

In 1994, the Rwandan government of the time, and some of its allies, explicitly called for the extermination of Rwanda’s Tutsi population amid violence that led to the deaths of around a million Rwandans.

Systematic persecution of the Isaaq people in northwestern Somalia (in the area of the now partially recognized republic of Somaliland) that led to the deaths and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, with particular intensity during the late 1980s, as insurgencies threatened Somalia’s dictator, Siad Barre.

Covers several episodes of mass atrocities in Sudan (including present-day South Sudan) throughout its tumultuous history, including the alleged genocide in the Darfur region in the 2000s.

Along with other Turkic peoples in China, the muslim Uyghur population has frequently faced discrimination and demographic peril forma variety of forces in China.  More material in process…

Considers the efforts to exterminate various populations during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, as well as antecedent episodes.