Themes

Comparative genocide is a branch of genocide studies that seeks to identify differences and similarities across genocidal (and similarly situated non-genocidal) episodes, and thus to isolate some of the more essential features of genocide that recur in all or most cases.

Common themes or targets of research in genocide studies include: the history of genocide; the factors that contribute to it; the process by which genocide unfolds; the role of different actors within that process, including those of perpetrators, victims, witnesses, bystanders, rescuers and resisters; the role of external third parties who may choose to intervene, permit, prevent, facilitate, or ignore genocide; and the debate over the definition of the term itself. The Genocide Studies Program has contributed to these discussions in many ways. GSP Director Ben Kiernan did so in his 2007 book, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Yale University Press), as did former GSP Fellow Adam Jones in his multi-edition Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (2006, 2009).

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) make it possible to interrelate spatially multiple types of information assembled from a range of sources. Remote sensing is the measurement of object properties on Earth’s surface using data acquired from aircraft and satellites. 

The jurisprudence of genocide, at both the national and international levels.

The MADE Initiative is at once a turn to the reality that much of the subject and methodology of genocide studies has undergone a dramatic change in the 21st Century and a return to the core principles of the GSP and its roots within the Cambodian Genocide Documentation Project.

Genocide scholarship is often motivated by the hope that future genocides can and will be prevented.  Some of that work specifically analyzes the efforts and strategies to do so.

The GSP’s Rescue page is dedicated to documenting and publicizing acts of resistance, protest and rescue that combat genocidal injustice and violation of human rights.  

Discussions and resources addressing domestic resistance to genocide specific locations.

The GSP and the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University co-sponsor the Holocaust Trauma Project, directed by Dr. Dori Laub. Dr. Laub, M.D. is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New Haven, Connecticut.  His work on trauma includes studies of the multifaceted impact of the Holocaust on the lives of survivors and that of their children, as well as on survivors of the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and of other genocides.

Truth Commissions hold an increasingly prominent place among the institutions of transitional justice that are employed in the wake of mass violence.  Where implemented, they stand as an important – though inevitably imperfect – source of information about periods of mass violence (including genocide), as well as a barometer of post-conflict social reconstruction.

Examinations of violations of the laws of war in civil and international conflict, which may or may not overlap with genocide and/or crimes against humanity.