MADE 2025-2026: Mapping Digital Age Atrocity Risks for Prevention Practitioners

The Mass Atrocities in the Digital Era (MADE) initiative, a component of Yale’s Genocide Studies Program, is a first-of-its-kind effort to examine how emerging technologies shape the landscape of atrocity prevention and accountability. MADE bridges research, practice, and policy by cultivating a new generation of scholars and practitioners equipped to navigate the human rights challenges of the digital age. This overview serves as the foundation for the program’s work on a forthcoming series of briefs that will identify and analyze patterns of warning and action in mass violence as they appear and are fomented by digital spaces.This work is intended for readers working in policy, human rights, journalism, and data governance—those best positioned to recognize and respond to patterns of risk before they escalate into harm.

Mass atrocities are understood as widespread and systematic attacks against civilians, encompassing genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. The Genocide Convention, adopted on December 9, 1948, established the first legal framework defining genocide as a crime under international law. As genocide scholar Scott Straus argues in Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016), preventing such violence is inherently complex. Atrocities emerge from layered political, social, and institutional conditions, and effective prevention requires identifying risks early, strengthening protective factors, and constraining actors with the capacity to harm. Straus emphasizes that prevention is not a single intervention but an ongoing effort to read warning signs, understand local dynamics, and disrupt pathways to violence before they harden.

Today, those pathways increasingly unfold through digital systems. Online platforms shape the visibility, organization, and repression that precede mass violence: social media determines who and what is seen, encrypted and semi-open networks enable rapid coordination, and surveillance technologies collapse the distance between intent and harm. AI systems (e.g., recommendation engines, generative content, and automated classification) can supercharge propaganda, accelerate targeting, and muddy attribution, while the same tools in responsible hands can illuminate patterns that once stayed hidden.

For practitioners, the implication is clear: treat digital signals as early-warning indicators to be monitored alongside traditional risk factors. Coordinated hate campaigns propagated by inauthentic networks, data-driven profiling that maps or categorizes vulnerable communities, and engineered connectivity disruptions (such as shutdowns, throttling, or geofenced blackouts) can all function as precursors to harm. Identifying these patterns early expands the window for prevention, documentation, and protective action.

MADE’s approach for the 2025 academic year is organized around four core modules: digital authoritarianism & extremism, platform dynamics & violence, militarization of technology, and digital infrastructures & identity. For each module, MADE will produce a practitioner oriented primer that maps the evolving ways technology is being leveraged to facilitate or mitigate mass atrocities through the module’s respective lens. The goal of these primers is to translate complex research into accessible, action-oriented tools for practitioners. In doing so, MADE aims to ensure that experts in atrocity prevention can remain adaptive and informed in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.