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Welcome to the GSP’s Amazon Region genocide case study.

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. For instance, according to The Economist (“Trees or Oil,” July 4, 2009): “Though half of Ecuador lies in the Amazon basin, its rainforest is shrinking faster than in neighbouring countries (by 1.67% a year). It has been ravaged by logging, poachers and oil extraction … Native tribes have been uprooted, forced deeper into the forest or have disappeared” (p. 47).

In the left sidebar you will find links to bibliographies and related websites.  

See also Survival International’s photo gallery, “Faces of Genocide.”

This page is still under construction.

In the near future, you will be able to follow the Audio/Visual link on the left menu to access 30 video interviews compiled by Proof: Media for Social Justice with individual rescuers who performed heroic acts of resistance during the Holocaust in Europe, and genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina.  From their stories, we hope you will learn about the tremendous courage and spirit of resistance that has accompanied genocidal crimes and human rights violations worldwide.

GSP Interdisciplinary Colloquia on Rescuers, 2008 and 2009:

2008 Colloquium:
“Rescuers of Genocide Victims: Research Perspectives for the Future”

2009 GSP-Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics symposium
“Genocide, Rescue and Prevention: Understanding and Fostering Rescue Behavior in the Face of Mass Killing” (May 8, 2009). See the report on this symposium in Bioethics at Yale, 2009-10, pp. 98-101. See the Conference Program and a description of the GSP/Bioethics project here.

GSP-sponsored research on Rescuers:

Mette Bastholm Jensen, PhD dissertation, Solidarity in Action: A Comparative Study of Rescue Efforts in Nazi-occupied Denmark and the Netherlands, Yale University, Department of Sociology, 2007.

“Courage of ordinary heroes on show to stop genocide,” The Australian, July 21, 2012.

Historical Analyses of Rescue

“The Rescue of Norwegian Jews,” by Ragnar Ulstein (1985)

New Publications on Rescue Behavior

Narratives of Rescue

Malka Czismadia (Hungary)
André Trocme (France)
Thérèse Nyirabayovu (Rwanda)

Post-Conflict Research Centre’s (Bosnia) Ordinary Heroes project