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Setting the agenda for evidence-basedresearch on ending mass atrocitiesBridget Conley-Zilkic & Alex de WaalPublished online: 12 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: Bridget Conley-Zilkic & Alex de Waal (2014) Setting the agenda for evidence-based research on ending mass atrocities, Journal of Genocide Research, 16:1, 55-76, DOI:10.1080/14623528.2014.878113

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Setting the agenda for evidence-basedresearch on ending mass atrocities

BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC and ALEX DE WAAL

The question of how mass atrocities end has been dominated by a normative approachregarding how they ought to end. Arguing that an evidence-based approach to terminatemass atrocities might offer profound insights into theories of mass atrocities as well aspolicies designed to prevent or end their occurrence, this article outlines the key questionsand approaches needed for an evidence-based study of atrocity endings. It draws ontheories of genocide, political violence and civil war termination, and presents initialinsights from case studies, including the killing of civilians in colonial German SouthwestAfrica, the Soviet Union, the Nigerian civil war, the Guatemalan civil war, the NubaMountains of Sudan and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

IntroductionThe field of genocide and mass atrocities studies has produced significantcontributions to knowledge of where, when and why campaigns of large-scale,one-sided violence occur, but offers relatively few explicit examinations of thepolitical, social and military dynamics of the de-escalation of violence. Thissimple question remains unexplored: how do mass atrocities end?

Answering this question will require study of the dynamics of endings in multiplecases and will not likely produce a single theory of termination.1 This article serves amore modest role; it sketches out the starting point for an evidence-based study ofendings. It begins with a brief overview of why both ‘mass atrocities’ and ‘endings’need to be problematized and explores how various theories of genocide and civilwar might inform a study of atrocity endings. The second half draws on short casestudies to introduce three broad scenarios for endings. (1) Perpetrators change theirpolicies because of outside influence, rise of moderates or resistance. (2) Perpetratorscarry their plans to fruition; leaders decrease use of lethal violence in order to normal-ize conditions for a range of reasons. (3) The most rare ending is that perpetrators aredefeated by interested parties or so-called humanitarian interventions.

Problematizing ‘mass atrocities’ and ‘endings’Language choice directly determines how endings are studied. Assumptionsembedded in the term ‘genocide’ have produced the dominant normative approach

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to ending systematic violence against civilians. As has been discussed in depth byothers, the Holocaust—rather, a simplified version of this complex history—castsan enormous shadow over the study of genocide. Although significant changes ingenocide studies have occurred in recent years,2 because insufficient attention hasbeen paid to how this newer research might challenge endings, little of the field’sadvances have impacted the question of termination.

Among the assumptions grandfathered from Holocaust studies into genocidestudies, and reified by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention’s definition of theterm,3 is that assaults against civilian groups should be qualitatively grouped,that is, selected based on assessment of the perpetrators’ intent to destroy. Thisis problematic for the study of endings for three primary reasons. First, itassumes a coherency among key actors involved in policies that produce atrocitiesthat rarely adheres to actual cases. Rather than coherency, at any one momentthere is often dissension within the group of decision-making elites, and overtime individual leaders often change their views and policies. Second is an under-lying assumption that halting violence will have to be undertaken from outside.Furthermore, there is an inherent bias in favour of this external force taking theform of military intervention. Finally, casting violence in terms of moral absolutesconfers upon those who would intervene a saviour status that pre-empts criticalanalysis of what interventions achieve and the effects they produce.

Recent shifts away from using the term ‘genocide’ in policy matters have notrectified these concerns. In fact, they have tended to deploy less specific defi-nitions of the phenomena at hand while attempting to retain the moral absolutesaddressed above. The Genocide Prevention Task Force (GPTF)4 draws attentionto this when it argues that the definitional dilemma is ‘how to harness thepower of the word [genocide] to motivate and mobilize while not allowingdebates about its definition or application to constrain or distract policymakersfrom addressing the core problems it describes’.5

Similarly, the concept of a ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), including articula-tion of the conditions under which the international community might militarilyintervene to protect populations, was conceptualized in relation to a smallhandful of cases that witnessed fairly high levels of casualties: Kosovo at10,000 deaths, Bosnia and Herzegovina at 100,0006 and Rwanda at 500,000. Dip-lomats, politicians and advocates called upon the R2P framework in Libya after1,000 civilians had died,7 and yet remain hamstrung in Syria when the numbersare significantly higher. Dramatic and highly publicized calls for a military sol-ution have also characterized public engagement and policy towards the LRA,which, according to the Invisible Children’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)Crisis Tracker,8 has allegedly been responsible for the deaths of 2,310 civiliansand 4,551 abductees between 2009 and October 2013. Compare this to the5,137 civilian deaths in Iraq in 20099 alone (a relatively calm year), which didnot spark any illusions that the US military could parachute in to resolve theproblem. In short, the new vocabularies developed for situations of extremeperil to civilian groups are not measured with anything that might resemble coher-ent criteria.

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One impact of the normative discourse that dominates the study and policy ofgenocide and atrocities is that it both simplifies and overburdens the conceptual-ization of endings. Simplification occurs when endings are treated as self-evident,without addressing what specific response measures should achieve. Should theyterminate large-scale campaigns against civilians, the conflict or context ofinstability in which mass atrocities generally occur, the regime that is perpetratingatrocities, or the political, social and economic marginalization that often rendersgroups vulnerable within a given society? When the expectations include such awide range of demands, the various tools developed to hasten endings areroughly hewn and unproven, if not unproveable. Endings are also overburdenedby expectations that all good things go together—concluding conflicts andinstability, rescuing civilians and achieving a new, more just dispensation.

In this article, we will use the term ‘mass atrocities’, which we define as wide-spread and systematic violence that results in the deaths of 50,000 or more civi-lians10 within a five-year period. There are strong parallels between ourdefinition and the legal term, ‘crimes against humanity’, but we have addedadditional numerical threshold and time parameters in order to anchor thisloosely defined concept. The target of the violence is civilians, but withoutfurther specification regarding group identity. In terms of scale, there is nomagic to the number of 50,000. However, there is value to having a numericalthreshold and logic behind this number. It is sufficiently high to enable a thoroughstudy of cases in the twentieth century, a project that will be a part of the longer-range study of endings, and yet low enough to include a wide range of cases andcapture variations in endings.

This approach has some shortcomings, foremost of which is that it will excludewhat can be enormously damaging assaults against groups whose numbers werequite small to begin with. Take, for instance, the example of the Mursi in Ethiopianear the Sudanese border. Relations between the Mursi and another local group,the Nyangatom, deteriorated sharply in the mid 1980s when the Nyangatomacquired automatic weapons after aligning themselves with pro-Sudanese govern-ment forces. A local dispute escalated when they attacked the Mursi in January orFebruary 1987, killing between 600 and 800 people—a number that representedten per cent of the small Mursi population.11 Violence even in these comparativelylow numbers impacted an exceptionally high percentage of the group; ourapproach will fail to capture such cases.

Another gap is that the five-year time period excludes cases where highnumbers of civilian deaths occurred over a longer time period. However, it is argu-able that different response mechanisms are needed for sudden, cataclysmic vio-lence than instances of steady attrition. Furthermore, across the range of historicalcases there is a remarkably wide range of phenomena captured in fatality figures.As we look at endings, there are some important differences between dying causedby increased mortality and killing campaigns—the tools, timeline and actors tendto be different, even if political interconnections are important to note. As far aswe can, we are prioritizing patterns of killing, but in all cases we highlight what is

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known about the numbers referenced. This way, at least we can draw attention todiscrepancies and suggest where further research would be helpful.

Using the term ‘mass atrocities’ even with specifications does not fix the pro-blems highlighted above in relation to ‘genocide’; it remains a very loose concep-tualization. However, this language choice draws attention to its conceptualambiguity whereas the normative assumptions of ‘genocide’ tend to obscure thesame fact.

Endings in this article are determined by the de-escalation of killing cam-paigns. This focus draws on important new insights in the fields of civil warand atrocity studies. While atrocities occur in the context of acute politicalchallenges, most frequently (but not exclusively) armed conflict, most conflictsand other forms of instability do not produce mass atrocities or genocide. Thetwo phenomena, while clearly linked, are not the same. There is widespreadconsensus on this insight, but nonetheless most work on genocide or atrocitiesoperates by identifying conflicts or instability in which there are high levels ofatrocities and then takes the entirety of that conflict or turmoil as its unit ofstudy.

Campaigns against civilians can be disaggregated from the larger context inwhich they occur. Even when atrocities occur, there is significant temporal andgeographic variation in patterns of violence against civilians. For instance, twoscholars, Benjamin Valentino and Jay Ulfelder,12 have argued that atrocitiestend to occur close to the onset of instability. This has significant implicationsfor those who might wish to prevent or protect civilians. Would not similar infor-mation about patterns of endings as differentiated from the endings of armed con-flicts and instability be valuable for scholarly and practical agendas?

How might existing theories of genocide and war inform a study of atrocityendings?The bulk of comparative research on genocide has theorized onset, not termin-ation, of violence. As Evgeny Finkel and Scott Straus argue, genocide theoriesfall into six major explanatory models: inter-group relations, regime type, hard-ship and upheaval, ideology, modernity and development, and leadership strat-egies.13 Except for leadership strategies, these theories of why genocide occurscannot account for why it ends, particularly given that, unlike the Holocaust, inmany cases of twentieth-century mass atrocities the perpetrators remain incontrol beyond the ending and yet decide to stop killing. The core conditions illu-minated by these theories remain unchanged, so they cannot be used to form abasis for study of why, when and how atrocities end.

Theories of leadership decision-making and mass killing, as represented byBenjamin Valentino’s work, do offer insights for endings. Valentino argues thata strategic perspective, which ‘suggests that mass killing is most accuratelyviewed as an instrumental policy—a brutal strategy designed to accomplishleaders’ most important ideological or political objectives and counter whatthey see as their most dangerous threats’,14 best captures the resort to mass

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killing. Valentino’s work reflects new consensus in political science that politicalviolence can most often be understood as emerging from a rational process.

Violence against civilians may be used by governments or insurgents to gleaninformation, or indiscriminately where such information is lacking; as punishmentfor groups associated with the opposition; to counter strategic setbacks or acquireresources; to promote ethnic cohesion or mobilization; to improve one’s bargain-ing position; to punish civilians for perceived support for a guerrilla movement;and in the case of gender-based violence, there also appear to be patterns inwho resorts to it and under what conditions.15 Furthermore, as Stathis Kalyvasasserts, local patterns of violence may follow their own logic that complicates,innovates and sometimes contrasts with the narrative of conflict as establishedby national elites.16

There is additional scholarly consensus that mass atrocities most frequentlyoccur within the context of armed conflict.17 Building from this, we turn to thestudy of war termination for additional insights. Foremost is that the question ofendings needs to be further disaggregated. The three main questions that thisfield has asked include: what was the vehicle for the ending (military victory,negotiated settlement, stalemate, etc.)? What factors impact how long wars last(duration)? And what is the relationship between particular types of warendings and other effects (recurrence, civilian targeting, etc.)?18

A study of atrocity endings would do well to adapt these questions: how doesthe violence against civilians end? Regarding duration, what factors help us tounderstand variations in the duration of periods of large-scale civilian targeting?As part of this question, we should examine shifting patterns of intensity of target-ing civilians within what might otherwise be understood as a single atrocity event.Atrocities rarely occur at a steady rate throughout an extended period. Whatfactors help to explain the spikes and valleys, in addition to the duration of thelonger period characterized by repeated large-scale targeting of civilians? Andthird, how does the type of ending relate to other questions of civilian protection,minority rights or recurrence of episodes, as well as the ending of the largercontext of instability—be it an armed conflict, revolution, coup or other suchevent—in which atrocities generally occur?

Beyond these questions, there are also some findings from civil war terminationthat may be relevant to atrocity endings. It is not a straightforward task, however,to compare results across a broad range of studies, as researchers use differentdefinitions of the core phenomenon, coding criteria, and questions posed to thedata. Some factors that have been central to the study of genocide and mass vio-lence, notably ethnicity and identity, are, as Nicholas Sambanis notes, highly sen-sitive to coding rules.19 Additionally, this field is also fairly young and so pointsof consensus are still emerging. Nonetheless, some general conclusions haveemerged about what conditions lend themselves to government versus rebel vic-tories; social, economic and military factors that tend to increase the duration ofconflicts; as well as trends in recurrence.

This research might be more readily brought to bear on specific cases ratherthan adopted for a general theory of atrocity endings. One must also remain

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wary of a complete identification of conflict trends with those related to atrocities.For instance, in the cases introduced below, particularly the Herero and the Niger-ian civil war, there is a disjunction between the conflict and atrocities. In theformer, the battles of the war ended by the time the systematic atrocities began;in the latter some of the worst atrocities occurred well before the war commenced.Furthermore, even in cases in which there is not ostensibly an ongoing armed con-flict, such as the communist revolutions in the Soviet Union and China, the threatof war either just ended or feared to be on the horizon casts an unquantifiableshadow over the turn to atrocities. These kinds of distinctions are important andrender an understanding of the relationship between the atrocities and conflictextremely difficult, if not impossible, to quantify.

There are nonetheless likely to be considerably more insights to be gleanedfrom civil war termination studies, but one weighs heavily on our question:such studies have, thus far, arrived at no consensus on the relationship betweencasualties and termination.20 The work of developing an evidence-based theoryof how mass atrocities end will require significant time and effort. For now, weoffer some initial contributions that suggest a series of dynamics aroundendings rather than a coherent theory.

Preliminary research: evidence from the case studiesWe will present short sketches of endings in the cases of assaults against the Herero(1904), Soviet deportations of the Chechens (1944), the Nigerian civil war (1967–70), the Guatemalan civil war (particularly 1981–83), the campaign against theNuba of Sudan (1992) and the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992–95). However,our preliminary insights also draw on the study of endings across a range ofcases: Native Americans, Bangladesh/East Pakistan, Uganda (Luwero Triangle),Rwanda, Somalia, Kosovo, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, NaziGermany, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Iraq.21

Across these cases, the most common ending was that the killers decided theyhad ‘killed enough’. The perpetrators in most of the cases had aims other thankilling the entirety of the victim group. Notable exceptions to this are the Holo-caust and Rwanda. In most other cases, the killing was instrumental and serveda distinct purpose, counter-insurgency being one of the most common deadly con-texts.22 Our analysis aims to delve deeper into the factors and logic that governdecision-making that constitutes ‘enough’ killing. In almost every case, multiplefactors played a role bringing about an ending. Rather than forming a tidy typol-ogy, termination processes are determined by a range of dynamics. However, wefind three broad scenarios that may overlap in practice, but each of which suggestsdifferent forces contributing to endings.

First, in many cases, the perpetrating regime’s decision that it had sufficientlybrought a group within its control—in short, it had succeeded—was critical.However, additional factors play a significant role: in some cases a decisionwas made to change the use of violence because of the ascendancy of moderatevoices within a regime or dissemination of information about radical policies to

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influential actors outside a regime elite. Resistance by a targeted group can alsorender the continued resort to violence unsustainable.

Second are cases in which a plan is carried out to completion and perpetratorsadhere to the original design for its ending. This may follow with a programme ofnormalization including different measures for controlling the targeted popu-lation. In other cases, it may be that the plan never articulated the use of violenceand so no perceived changes were deemed necessary, and we will provide anexample of this. We want to be clear that the goal of the violence is a fact of pol-itical significance that should be considered in efforts to halt it, although it may beimmaterial for the victims or in a legal context if a perpetrator is subsequentlybrought to court.

Third, there are an important number of cases in which perpetrators lose controlthrough military defeat. Historically, this rarely occurs through so-called humani-tarian interventions. Other defeats occur when a neighbouring country intervenesor there is some other significant shift in balance of power on the battlefield. Foreach of these dynamics we offer an example from our preliminary research.

Change in tacticsAscendancy of moderate voices within a regime

In some cases, mass killing can occur through the decisions of a small, radicalizedportion of leaders. Lacking consensus on the plan, the dynamics of when and howviolence is deployed and ended is caught up within the capacity of factions toassert their control. The Nigerian civil war offers such an example.

Estimates of the deaths in this conflict vary widely—from tens of thousands toover two million—in a conflict with clear ethnic divisions that pitted a nationalgovernment army against a fledging breakaway state. Journalists, humanitarians,priests and politicians used the word ‘genocide’, and newspapers ran pictures ofemaciated children in the Biafran enclave, comparing them to the images ofBelsen and Dachau. Yet the case is not studied within the canon of genocidenor are its complicated lessons brought to bear on the understanding of mass atro-cities.

The context was a turbulent, young, postcolonial state that experienced severalviolent changes of leadership in the immediate aftermath of independence. Orga-nized killing of Igbo, a group whose ancestral home lay in the east, began withstate-sanctioned pogroms in northern and western Nigeria. With the collusion ofnorthern government officials, between 29 May and 29 September 1966, aminimum of 3,000 and a maximum of 30,000 Igbos living in northern Nigeriawere killed in seemingly well-organized pogroms.23 Mobs supported by theregional government assaulted Igbo, targeting individuals because of theirgroup identity. The death tolls are not well documented, but even the lower esti-mates coupled with the patterns of assault make a strong case for considering thesemurders within a framework of mass atrocity, if not genocide. They occurred inwaves of intensive violence that ebbed and flowed over several months. Nigerian

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President Gen. Yakubu Gowon protested, but was unable to assert national gov-ernmental authority to halt the violence.

The pogrom ended when 150,000–300,000 Igbos fled south and east to theirtraditional lands.24 Shortly thereafter, a young Igbo leader, Gen. EmekaOjukwu, declared the independence of the eastern region under the name of anew state, the Republic of Biafra.

The Nigerian government responded by waging war to reclaim the region. Theyimposed a brutal blockade that crippled the Biafran population, and, despite amassive aid effort that launched the concept of humanitarian sans-frontierism,25

resulted in the deaths of an estimated one million people due largely to malnu-trition and disease. Threats of massacre by some Nigerian generals were inter-preted as omens of genocide. For instance, Benjamin Adekunle stated: ‘Weshoot at everything that moves and when our troops march into the center ofIbo territory, we shoot at everything even at things that do not move’.26

Among contemporary commentators—both among Igbo and a broader inter-national advocacy movement—there was a dramatic increase in the rhetoric andperception that genocide was imminent should Biafra lose the war.

As the war progressed, however, the Biafran enclave’s chances for indepen-dence rapidly diminished. With arms supplies exhausted and their territoriesreduced, Biafra had little chance of hanging on. However, its leaders managedto capture an international audience by selling a story of atrocity and manmadefamine. Humanitarian aid agencies took sides, and flights into Biafra at timesmixed food supplies with weapons, all in the name of a bold stand against govern-mental assaults against civilians.27

The government forces experienced increasing military successes and by themiddle of 1969 Gowon had replaced his leading generals, who had beenallowed considerable latitude, with men more under his control.28 The bordersof the Biafra enclave shrank with each battle. The conflict ended with theBiafran surrender. As Ojukwu fled, pledging that the fight would continue, hehad lost his internal political support. As the war ended, the victorious Nigerianpresident, Gen. Yakubu Gowon, declared ‘no victor, no vanquished.’

In this case, ending the war meant the termination of civilian deaths. Ulti-mately, there was no genocidal plan and there were no retributions. Contrary tomany assumptions about the path of atrocities, in this case the consolidation ofnational government authority, the collapse of the Biafran political structureand the defeat of its armed forces enabled the ending of the war and, thereby, civi-lian dying. This convoluted path turns the narrative of ending genocide on its head.

Dissemination of information to influential actors outside a regime elite

Even in circumstances where decision-making is concentrated in the hands of asmall number of individuals who consciously decide on a policy of masskilling, outside actors can make an impact in altering such a plan. Few regimesare completely unresponsive to outside constituencies—a fact that holds true atany point in history.

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The colonial case of the Herero in present-day Namibia offers such an example.Colonial German assaults against the Herero demonstrate how a number offactors, including media reports about violence, concern for the German imperialreputation, criticism from German opposition groups and eventually settlers them-selves, rendered the programme of mass killing unsustainable. German colonialwars in today’s Namibia and Tanzania took an enormous toll on the indigenouspopulations: an estimated 60,000 Herero, 10,000 Nama and up to 250,000Ngoni, Ngindo, Matumbi and others.29 We focus on the Herero.

In April 1904, a three-month Herero uprising against the European authoritiesin German Southwest Africa entered a new, deadly phase. Kaiser Wilhelm mar-ginalized the governor, Theodor Leutwein, and designated Lt.-General Lotharvon Trotha the commander of the territories.30 Previously, Leutwein hadpursued dispossession of the Herero by fomenting intercommunal disputes,enabling the Germans to benefit from the disunity within the Herero’s traditionalsocial structures. Leutwein’s strategy came under critique from the settler commu-nity and the lower ranks of his own forces, who wanted accelerated control overland and resources, a desire sharpened by their sense of insecurity once the Hererouprising began in 1904. Their concerns seemed to be answered when von Trothatook the helm with orders from the Kaiser to ‘crush the rebellion by all meansnecessary’.31 The appointment empowered a particularly radical leader and sig-nalled that his support came from the top of the German power structure.

The war was largely won after the Herero lost a key battle at Waterberg on 11August 1904. But von Trotha decided against allowing surrender. His plan, as hewrote in his diary, was ‘to encircle the masses of Hereros at Waterberg, and toannihilate these masses with a simultaneous blow, then to establish variousstations to hunt down and disarm the splinter groups who escaped’.32 This heaccomplished, driving the Herero to the fringes of the Kalahari Desert in a ruthlessanti-insurgency campaign whereby Herero were shot, beaten, hanged, starved andraped. He issued the now infamous extermination policy on 2 October 1904:‘Within the German borders every Herero, with or without a gun, with orwithout cattle, will be shot’.33

Those Herero who could, fled through the desert either south or north, out ofreach of the German army. Some managed to escape past the German cordonand joined communities in remote areas of Hereroland, where they continued toface military assaults whenever they were discovered.34 But many died in thedesert or at the hands of German forces.

Ultimately, the kill order was rescinded because of internal dissent wherebymoderate forces made their voices heard and previous supporters of mass violencesought their advantage in more moderate measures. In Germany, media reports onthe conduct of the war created concerns over Germany’s imperial reputation.35

Criticism of the brutality directed against the Herero arose from the Rhenish Mis-sionary Society and the Social Democratic Party.36 Settlers, colonial leaders andsoldiers who had previously criticized Leutwein for his moderation soon realizedthat von Trotha’s extreme violence inhibited the further dispossession of theHerero by killing off their cattle in the desert and denying settlers the opportunity

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to exploit the Herero’s labour. The combination of these factors increased pressureon the Kaiser to alter policies. In December 1904, von Trotha was ordered to‘grant mercy to all those Herero who surrender voluntarily’.37 The policyshifted to interring captured Herero in labour camps that operated under brutalconditions and caused the deaths of thousands more. Improvements, in thename of preserving the workforce, were later mandated and in 1908 the campsclosed, although forced labour continued. The 1911 census recorded that lessthan a fifth of the Herero population at the start of German rule was found tohave survived the war and subsequent years.38

The long history of colonial dispossession, abuse and marginalization of indi-genous populations may be inherently genocidal, as Dominik Schaller, MarkLevene, Ward Churchill, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell, among others,have argued. The social and political processes engendered by such racismdemand and have garnered entire fields of inquiry and political action. In ourreview of this one case, where mass killing was the tool enacted as part of animperial design, we find that its termination came about because killing was ulti-mately counter-productive within the larger colonial schemes for southwestAfrica.

Resistance by a targeted group may make the continued resort to violenceunsustainable

Mass atrocities often end only when a government manages to destroy the capacityof a group to continue armed resistance. The case of Sudan’s Nuba Mountains inthe early 1990s offers a different perspective: resistance prolonged the conflictlong enough that the inherently unsustainable genocidal plan was altered.

The Government of Sudan’s counter-insurgency against the rebels of theSudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the Nuba Mountains of centralSudan during the early 1990s was exceptionally violent. Not only did the gov-ernment aim to defeat the SPLA forces but they also intended a wholesaletransformation of Nuba society that entailed the destruction of its prior identity.The campaign was genocidal in intent and, at one point, appeared to be on thebrink of success.

In the mid 1980s, many Nuba, long treated as second-class citizens by the domi-nant classes of Sudan, joined the southern-led SPLA, and in 1985 fighting began.Government-aligned militias, ‘Popular Defence Forces’, committed the worstmassacres of the war, driven not only by orders from their paramilitarycommand, but also by their own search for cattle, loot and cheap labour. AJune 1989 Islamist coup brought a brief period of respite to the Nuba, followedrapidly by an escalation of violence. In October 1991, the government sealedoff southern Kordofan, prohibiting travel by foreigners. This was the first stepin an unprecedented military assault accompanied by a radical plan for populationrelocation—marking the jihad as being more than another military offensive.Intending to resettle 500,000 people, the entire population of the insurgent area,by late 1992, the government had relocated a third of that number.

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Death squads targeted community leaders in rural areas, while intellectuals inthe towns were rounded up by Military Intelligence and ‘disappeared’. Rapewas ubiquitous in the campaign. Government forces followed a policy offamine. They disrupted trade and closed markets, destroyed farms and lootedanimals. Raiding, abduction and rape prevented any movement between villagesand markets. Thousands died of hunger and disease, while the flow of basic goodsto the rebel areas almost completely dried up. The Nuba Mountains went back intime: people wore home-spun cotton or went naked, could no longer use currencyand so instead reverted to barter, and relied upon traditional medical remedies.

The policy was genocidal in both intent and possible outcome. Why did it notsucceed? There were three reasons: the limits of the jihad-ist project, the resist-ance of the SPLA and the opposition of bystanders. The project of jihad failedin significant part because of its internal contradictions. It failed to obtain a politi-cal consensus across Sudan’s ruling elite. There was no single centrally directedconspiracy, but rather an interplay between ideology, greed, war strategy, politicalcompetition and personal ambition. The origins of the jihad lay in the vision of thetotal social transformation of Sudan into an Islamic state, under the guidance ofthe National Islamic Front. This involved ‘curing’39 what were identified associal ills and pathologies, including the allegedly ‘un-Islamic’ practices ofgroups such as the Nuba. Given that large sections of the Sudanese citizenry,including many Nuba, were in armed revolt against this socio-cultural project(as well as its accompanied political oppression and economic exploitation),this led to a merger between social transformation and counter-insurgency. Inturn this logically led to a project of destroying those groups who resisted,either by physically eliminating their members or by eradicating their culturesand assimilating the survivors.

A group of militant Islamists and security officers garnered the endorsement ofthe highest level of the state apparatus for the concept of a jihad, and mobilizedconsiderable resources, including aircraft and foreign military advisers.However, while they were fighting their jihad, they were also engaged in aninternal power struggle with others within the government and army whowished to pursue a less radical approach, including some who (even at thatdate) sought a ceasefire and negotiated settlement. Ultimately, this meant thatthe commanders were unable to sustain the political consensus over the longerperiod of time required to complete their project.40 Most seriously, the fatwafailed to obtain the public endorsement of the Islamists’ leader, Dr. Hassan alTurabi.

Likewise, the government was united in support of the 1992 military offensive,but not the policy of relocation. Divides reached right down to the provincial level.Military Intelligence in Kordofan, commanded by Col. Ahmed Khamis, was fer-vently in support of extreme measures, including eliminating large numbers ofeducated Nuba.41 A handful of Nuba chiefs were also ready to collaborate, antici-pating absolute power within their fiefdoms. For example, Chief Kafi TayaraBedin was an outspoken supporter of relocations, and ran a private prison incollaboration with Khamis. But the army relied on Nuba soldiers and

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Non-Commissioned Officers for many of its troops, and as stories of the excessesof the jihad spread, there was an upsurge in discontent within the ranks.

The resistance of the SPLA was the second major factor in halting the Nubagenocide. The defence of Tullishi mountain, during which an SPLA battalionheld off a Sudanese army division for three weeks, was probably the finest featof arms by the SPLA during the entire war. At that point, several SPLA attemptsto resupply the Nuba Mountains were unsuccessful. There was no humanitarianpresence in the region at all. There was no news coverage, and in any case thepeople in the mountains had no batteries for their radios. The Nuba felt forgottenby everyone. With no-one but themselves to rely on, they found the necessarydetermination and reserves of energy. Under the charismatic Nuba leader,Yousif Kuwa, the Nuba forged a consensus agreement in September 1992, decid-ing collectively to continue fighting.

A supplementary reason for the defeat of the genocidal project was wider oppo-sition in Sudanese society. The leaders of the Kordofan jihad tried to keep the truenature of their activities secret. However, by relocating destitute and starvingNuba civilians to the outskirts of northern Kordofan towns, the authoritiesbrought their activities to wider attention. Shocked by what they were witnessing,the citizens of these towns began to bring food and medicine to the Nuba dumpedon their doorstep. They were still more shocked when the security forces stoppedtheir charitable activities. The groundswell of popular disgust, expressed throughsocial networks rather than in the open, contributed to the retreat of the militants.

Stick to the planPerceived need to normalize conditions and shift tactics

The 1981–83 campaign against the Maya in Guatemala offers another dynamicfor consideration: a brief period of intensified violence was intended as a prelimi-nary step to a more diverse range of mechanisms for controlling the targeted popu-lation. In Guatemala, military leaders understood the need to normalizeconditions.

The civil war in Guatemala (1960–96) was among the bloodiest of Latin Amer-ica’s Cold War conflicts. An estimated two hundred thousand people were killedor disappeared. While it began as a Marxist-Leninist insurgency, ethnicity influ-ences class hierarchies in the country and inevitably impacted the character ofthe conflict. By the late 1970s, the government, ruled by vested Ladino elites,was facing a range of challenges from reformist politicians, the CatholicChurch, indigenous groups, labour and student activists and a rural communistarmed insurgency that was particularly active in Mayan areas.42 In early 1982,three previously independent guerrilla groups joined forces to form the Guatema-lan National Revolutionary Unity. In response to these perceived threats, the gov-ernment intensified its counter-offensive, beginning with sweeps against theguerrillas’ urban infrastructure and other popular movements and stretching outto scorched earth tactics throughout the Mayan highlands. Described by Jennifer

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Schirmer as ‘blind, random, and massive’, these assaults inadvertently served toincrease the rebel ranks.43

Junior officers, critical of the poorly managed war and self-enrichment of seniorarmy leaders,44 organized a coup on 7 March 1982, which installed General RiosMontt as head of state. While the entire period between 1981 and 1983 was sig-nificantly more violent than the span of the civil war, the period that overlappedwith Montt’s time in power witnessed the height of the assaults against Maya.Calling for a thorough modernization of the state, Montt and his collaboratorsdeveloped a security and development plan that prioritized defeating the insur-gency and included other repressive policies: suspension of the constitution,closing the parliament and arresting and torturing opponents.

The cadre of junior military leaders who crafted the counter-insurgency planimplemented under Montt’s leadership understood that the previous indiscrimi-nate use of violence was counter-productive. They also recognized that the historicmarginalization, poverty and alienation of the Maya contributed to the success ofthe insurgency. Their response was to craft an uncompromising militarized policythat would first crush the rebels and then force the Maya to conform to theirversion of greater social integration. The counter-insurgency included systematic,ruthless assaults on rebel strongholds, and a second phase intent on control overMaya social and cultural expression. Neither phase included any compromise;the success of the plan rested on the extent to which it was conducted entirelyon their terms.

Government forces killed, raped, tortured and forcibly displaced Maya in therural mountain regions. Three separate zones were created—white, pink andred—to indicate the level of cooperation between civilian and guerrilla groups,and therefore the level of violence to be used in each zone. Red indicated thatno distinctions were to be made between civilians and combatants.45 Some 440villages were destroyed and some 200,000 people fled to Mexico and close toone million were internally displaced. In the worst hit community, Rabinal,twenty per cent of the population was killed; ninety-nine per cent of the victimswere Maya.46 Between 1981 and 1983, some 100,000–150,000 GuatemalanMaya were killed by the national armed forces.47

On 6 August 1983, Montt was overthrown in another military coup. The com-plaints against him did not include the counter-insurgency, which was deemedsuccessful. Instead, his usurpers focused on returning to a clearer separation ofmilitary and civilian roles, restoration of the military hierarchy, revision of taxpolicies and a return to an electoral calendar. Jennifer Schirmer’s interviewswith military leaders revealed that Montt’s evangelical preaching and loss ofcontrol over the military also played a role in his overthrow.48 Montt had insistedthat ‘at least seven more years’49 were needed in order to consolidate control,whereas the army and its civilian allies ‘recognized that a facade of constitutionaldemocracy was needed to overcome the contradictions of direct military dictator-ship’.50

With Montt gone, the counter-insurgency in the Maya rural areas shifted toa three-pronged ‘security-qua-development’51 strategy for institutionalizing

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control over the Mayan communities: (1) mandatory ‘self-patrolling’, essen-tially forcing the community to participate in the suppression of any guerrillaor political activities; (2) the creation of ‘model villages’ under militarycontrol for forcibly displaced populations; and (3) the centralization of develop-ment projects under military control, which created a parallel military structurefor all civilian authorities.52 The goal was to transition the Maya to ‘consent’ toplaying a role themselves in the control of their communities.53 The warcontinued until 1996. The economic and political marginalization of theMaya continues.54

Violence, despite predictability and scale of incurrence, was not an integral goalof the plan, so subsided as the plan was carried out

Communist experiments in large-scale social transformation offer exampleswhereby government authorities rule over highly centralized power structuresand articulate a vision of social transformation that penetrates across vast geo-graphic space and local dynamics. While some phases of this transformationinclude explicit orders to commit violence,55 in others, such as ethnic deporta-tions, violence ensues from what Norman Naimark describes as ‘the overwhelm-ing need for homogeneity from the center and an antagonism toward genuineautonomy, real cultural difference, and idiosyncratic arrangements of any kind’.56

The pattern of violence against civilians under Josef Stalin appears as a seriesof waves, with sharp, sudden peaks and low valleys separating incidents thatrepeat throughout his tenure, ending upon his death in 1953. Among the episodeswere forced collectivization (peaked 1930–31); starvation of the Ukrainians(1932–33); deportations of ethnic groups (1935–38); an exceptionally highspike caused by executions and mass shootings of suspected political opponentsduring the Great Terror (1937–38); and terror during World War II against‘enemies’ (1942, 1945–46).57 Paul Gregory postulates that both the spikes inviolence and the moment of their ending correlated with Stalin’s calculationsabout how much terror was necessary to maintain his tight control over thestate apparatus.

Ethnic deportations were not planned campaigns of mass violence, but wereplanned campaigns that necessarily entailed mass violence in their implemen-tation. The ending in this case relates to the carrying out of the plan to completionregardless of the death rate. The most destructive of the ethnic-based policiespursued by Stalin were the deportations of entire groups. The first wave, asTerry Martin writes, was between 1935 and 1938, and included the forceful relo-cation of Poles, Germans, Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Koreans, Chinese, Kurdsand Iranians away from border zones.58 It caused the deaths of an estimated680,000 people.59 World War II led to a second phase of mass deportations,and included moving 1.2 million Germans to Siberia and Central Asia, as wellas the entire populations of the Crimean Tartars, Klamyk, Chechen, Ingush,Balkar, Karachai and Meskhetian Turks who were sent to Central Asia. Other

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groups were moved away from border regions: the Kurds, Khemshils (MuslimArmenians), Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians and Iranians.

Mass murder was not the norm, but extreme violence was an accepted part ofthe policy during round-ups, where resistance was met with violence or imprison-ment in harsh conditions that often resulted in death. The speed of deportationsmeant that they were carried out with inadequate measures such that civiliansdied of disease, malnutrition and exposure. Furthermore, the ethnic groups ident-ified for deportations were simultaneously stigmatized and more vulnerable toother measures of terror such as mass arrests and executions.60

The fate of the Chechens is exemplary. Stalin was concerned that the Chechensharboured pro-German sentiments because a small number were in revolt againstthe Soviets or fought with the Nazis, even though a much higher number foughtloyally on the Soviet side. On 23 February 1944, Soviet forces carried outStalin’s order to deport the entire Chechen population from the Caucasus toKazakhstan.

Soviet documents note the success of the deportations. Telegrams and reportssent to Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (People’s Commissariat ofInternal Affairs or NKVD) chief Lavrentiy Beria concerning the operation demon-strate that it was essentially concluded by 20 March 1944, and that ‘no negativereactions from either special settlers or the [local] population’ disrupted it. Atotal of 60,312 Chechens, Ingush and Balkars were transported to Akmola byits end date.61 Chechen histories, however, emphasize the level of violence thatthe deportations entailed. Speed was crucial to the initial round-ups, wherepeople were given only fifteen minutes to prepare to move thousands of kilometresaway.62 Deaths occurred during the round-ups, en route in overcrowded cattle carsand in exile, where death rates remained high—thirty-five per cent—for the firstfive years after the deportations. Poor living conditions, inadequate food, hardlabour and a typhus epidemic all exacted cruel tolls.63 Pohl argues that Chechenssuffered a higher death rate than other deported peoples because they continued toresist Soviet pressure wherever they could.

Ultimately, the pattern of violence against civilians instituted by Stalin onlyirreversibly changed with his death in 1953—another form of change in leader-ship. For Chechens, rehabilitation and large-scale return to their homes becamepossible in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev issued a decree absolving Chechensof the charge of treason.64 In command of an exceptionally powerful and centra-lized state, Stalin’s orders to deport entire ethnic groups—which were not his mostlethal orders—nonetheless when carried out in local conditions and with utmosthaste produced predictable violence. The about-face under Khrushchev andeven the manipulations by which Khrushchev was able to sideline his moreradical competitor for leadership, Lavrentiy Beria, upon Stalin’s death indicatethat there probably was internal dissent over Stalin’s policies.65 While Stalinlived, however, it was not impactful. It must also be recalled that Stalin’s reigncombined revolutionary consolidation with the devastation of World War II—two contexts that rendered challenges to leadership extremely dangerous and

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enabled Stalin to pursue his policies constrained only by the limits on theresources that could be mobilized by state and party.

Military defeat of main aggressorsThe most common form of military intervention that ends atrocities is an inter-ested intervention, that is, one undertaken for more traditionally articulatednational security reasons. Examples of this include the Allied forces in WorldWar II, Vietnam in Cambodia, India in Bangladesh and the Rwandan PatrioticFront in Rwanda. In each of these cases the interventions came late, after muchof the killing had finished. In Bangladesh, most of the targeted killing hadceased some months before the Indian military intervention, which was promptedby the exodus of Bangladeshi refugees into India in the context of longstandingIndian–Pakistani political rivalry and on-off armed conflict. In the case of Cam-bodia, the Vietnamese invasion was prompted by Cambodian military aggressionagainst Vietnam, and humanitarian aims did not figure at all in the motives for theVietnamese military action.

In fact, coercive ‘humanitarian interventions’ are rare; three notable cases areBosnia-Herzegovina (1992–95), Kosovo (1999) and Libya (2011). Each ofthese cases deserves closer attention to the lessons that can be learned fromthem as models for ending atrocities. Libya is significant because the interventioncame early, in response to credible threats of imminent mass atrocities rather thanas a belated attempt to end them.

Here we will only briefly address the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which isoften cited as a case in which international armed intervention produced a decisiveending. For example, Samantha Power writes: ‘backed by the newly crediblethreat of military force, the United States was easily able to convince the Serbsto stop shelling civilians’; and later, that ‘NATO bombing in Bosnia, when itfinally came, rapidly brought that three-and-a-half year war to a close’.66 Thesestatements betray two inaccuracies: first, equating the patterns of atrocities withthose of the larger armed conflict; and second, simplification of the necessary pol-itical and military conditions that enabled the conflict to end.

According to data from the Research and Documentation Center of Sarajevo,67

over forty per cent of all civilians killed in the conflict were killed by the end of thesummer of 1992. The only subsequent significant spike in killing is the notableexception of Srebrenica (July 1995). This early spike in killing occurred as thefront lines of the conflict were being established, with killing occurring largelybehind the lines—in other words, not as a result of the fighting between armedgroups but in organized campaigns against Muslims and Croat civilians in areasclaimed by the Bosnian Serbs. Thereafter, and up to the end of the war, thelocation of violence against civilians more closely correlates with the frontlines, which shifted in 1993 (with the new front between the Croatians and theBosnian government) and in 1995.68

Three key factors contributed to the decrease in campaigns of violence againstcivilians by the end of the summer of 1992. First is the success of the Bosnian

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Serbs’ plans; by summer’s end they had achieved many of their war aims.69

Second, crucial stops in the Bosnian Serb offensives occurred when they met orga-nized resistance: in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zenica, Bihac and Mostar. This resistancecame from loosely formed and localized groups, relying on various actors, includ-ing some military leaders, but also police and some criminal elements. A third sig-nificant factor was the limited capacity of the Bosnian Serbs, notably inmanpower. When they failed to take major urban areas immediately, they didnot have the capacity to fight for them and instead opted to pound key citiesfrom high ground.70 Destructive as these sieges were, they did not equal thelethal effects for civilians that were witnessed in the ethnic cleansing campaignsthat marked the early weeks of the conflict.

The genocide at Srebrenica in 1995 demands special attention in the study ofatrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Designated a safe haven in 1993, it was neverdisarmed nor was it ever really protected—a betrayal of both of the key designa-tions that ‘safe haven’ was supposed to indicate. When the war was shifting in1995, Bosnian Serbs decided to reduce the size of the enclave, and when theymet little resistance, to take it over. The resistance collapsed because the menof fighting age had largely decided to retreat through the woods to try to reach gov-ernment-held territory. An estimated 20,000–30,000 civilians tried to find safetyat the nearby UN compound at Potocari. Killing started immediately as BosnianMuslims came into contact with Bosnian Serbs and happened at various pointsover the course of the following days: during interrogations; as people wereselected from the crowds at Potocari; in some combat between the column andSerb forces; and as men surrendered. The main killing operation occurred atseveral holding sites, where men, prisoners of war and others were taken enmasse, blindfolded, hands tethered behind their backs, and executed by killingsquads. In total, 8,372 people were killed.71

Various explanations have been advanced for why the level of killing was sohigh at Srebrenica. Perhaps the Bosnian Serbs intended the violence to serve aspunishment or revenge for resistance mounted from the enclave into neighbouringSerb-held territories throughout the war. Perhaps they wanted to demonstrate theirpower at a point when the conflict appeared to be shifting. It is also conceivablethat the Bosnian Serbs were angered that the Bosnian Muslim military leadershiphad fled, attempting to escape their grasp. And it could simply have been a con-tinuation of the policies of 1992, further violent ethnic cleansing of areas con-sidered a core part of the Serb Republic. Regardless, the killing campaigns hadbeen brutally concluded long before the NATO bombing campaign, OperationDeliberate Force, began on 30 August 1995.

Furthermore, the ending of the conflict cannot simply be attributed to NATOaction. There were three significant factors. First, regional alliances werepivotal, re-forging the Bosnian government and Croatian cooperation, due in nosmall part to US diplomacy. Also, tensions with Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic wea-kened the Bosnian Serbs’ hand. Second, shifts in military advantage in the groundwar resulted from the above change in alliances and changed the Bosnian Serbs’calculations about opting for a negotiated solution.72 Third, outside pressure

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became more focused and purposeful once greater consensus on the endgame wasforged between the US, Europe and Russia.

The international diplomatic contributions were arguably more important thanthe international military action. The war ended with the signing of the DaytonAgreement on 14 December 1995. Although Dayton effectively ended the war,it established a system of governance precisely based on the political-ethnic defi-nitions and divisions of the conflict. The Dayton formula has thus far provedincapable of reuniting Bosnia-Herzegovina in any meaningful sense and has there-fore cemented rather than remedied the ethnic cleansing of the war years. Redu-cing the ‘lessons learned’ from Bosnia to merely the impact of OperationDeliberate Force produced a simplistic and over-eager resort to air power inresponse to violence in Serbia’s southern region of Kosovo in 1999.

In conclusionFor the individuals and societies that experience mass atrocities, endings areelusive. There are many reasons why it might be better to describe the aftermathof violence in terms of legacies and reverberations. These include matters such asthe physical and mental health of survivors, their political, social and economicmarginalization, protracted legal proceedings that promise closure but rarelydeliver it, and the impacts of large-scale demographic changes. There are alsoenduring intergenerational impacts of violence, and later political deploymentsof history and quasi-historical narratives. The reality of these complications, theapproaches to the challenges they present and the timeline for change are differentfrom the endings we have examined.

Nonetheless, study of the ending of killing campaigns is important. Above allelse, we must recognize that these campaigns do end and better understand why.How we engage the ending of specific campaigns should also be related to ourability to grasp broader trends whereby violence, including asymmetrical vio-lence, is declining. Birger Heldt, using Barbara Harff’s data on genocide and poli-ticide, has noted a ninety per cent decrease in the incidence of such violence since1991.73 We may be living, as Steven Pinker argues, in the ‘most peaceable era ofour species’ existence’.74 Today, international and civil armed conflicts are lessfrequent and less deadly than perhaps ever before in history.75 The radicalextremes of genocide and mass killing that target tens of thousands, if notmore, have always been rare and are becoming increasingly so.

This is not to advocate for complacency, given the enormous potential for vio-lence as witnessed in the rarest cases. Violent episodes may indeed follow a powerlaw, in which scale correlates with rarity. The most extreme events, howeveruncommon they may be, cannot be ruled out. Also, the very rarity of mass atro-cities makes them all the more reprehensible: we now know that they need notoccur. However, these considerations mean that anyone interested in civilian pro-tection needs not only to focus on paradigmatic extreme cases, but also to developways of thinking about and responding to the challenges of more common formsof violence.

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Through a study of endings, we may also improve our understanding of vio-lence per se. Escaping the linear model that bad people escalate violencebecause they are evil and that ‘we’ need to stop them, we may uncover newinsights into how, where and why violence occurs. Understanding endings willallow us to promote them more effectively, and avoid the perils of a publicpolicy that ignores important facets of the phenomenon in question. Publicpolicy made on the basis of faulty evidence and analysis, combined with moralpanic, is almost sure to be bad policy and to have unintended outcomes that out-weigh the intended ones. Finally, the increasingly apparent limits and failures ofthe normative, interventionist ending means we need to become a lot smarter inhow to deal with the problem of large-scale killing.

This article does not provide a systematic evidence-based research agenda onending mass atrocities; it is a preliminary inquiry into the challenges of such astudy. Necessary to carry this agenda forward is a much greater diversity ofcases than those generally associated with genocide. These cases, however,need to adhere to a consistent definition and measurement criteria that are, asmuch as possible, not dominated by normative criteria. Endings must be likewisedisaggregated, defined and given structure.

A sense of urgency and responsibility towards entire populations at risk of vio-lence is no excuse for lack of rigour in studying how to end such threats and apply-ing these insights to policy. Setting an agenda for an evidence-based study ofending mass atrocities is foremost a call to refuse to relinquish critical analysisin the name of emergency, and to marry action with rigorous research.

AcknowledgementThe authors would like to thank several anonymous reviewers for their commentsand the editors of the journal for their proofreading help.

Endnotes

1 For previous theorizations of genocide and atrocity endings, see Alex de Waal and Bridget Conley-Zilkic,‘Reflections on how genocidal killings are brought to an end’, 22 December 2006, available at:howgenocidesend.ssrc.org/de_Waal/; Alex de Waal, ‘Reflections on the difficulties of defining Darfur’scrisis as genocide’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Vol. 20, 2007, pp. 25–33; Alex de Waal, Jens Meierhen-rich and Bridget Conley-Zilkic, ‘How mass atrocities end: an evidence-based counter-narrative’, The FletcherForum of World Affairs, 31 January 2012, available at: www.fletcherforum.org/2012/01/31/dewaal-etal/;Bridget Conley-Zilkic, ‘A challenge to those working in the field of genocide prevention and response’,Sur: A Human Rights Journal, Vol. 9, No. 16, 2012, pp. 33–60. For an early effort to make insights fromthe civil war termination literature usable for the study of genocidal endings in general, and for introducingand theorizing the concept of ‘genocide termination’ in particular, see Jens Meierhenrich, ‘How genocidesend: an analytical framework’, paper presented at the workshop on ‘How Genocides End I’, Harvard Univer-sity, 9–10 May 2008.

2 A. Dirk Moses, ‘The Holocaust and genocide’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The historiography of the Holocaust(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 533–551.

3 Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of genocide (1944) offered a much stronger framework for analysing thevariations in policies directed against groups deemed undesirable. However, at this point in history it is noteasy to excavate this counter-narrative from the mass of assumptions the term has since accrued.

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4 Genocide Prevention Task Force, Preventing genocide, a blueprint for US policymakers (Washington, DC:United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The American Academy of Diplomacy, The United States Insti-tute of Peace, 2008), p. xxii.

5 Genocide Prevention Task Force, Preventing genocide, p. xxi.6 The number of 100,000 in Bosnia reflects people immediately killed in the conflict, and does not address how

the war may have contributed to increased mortality in other ways.7 Gareth Evans, ‘No fly zone will help stop Gaddafi’s carnage’, Financial Times, 27 February 2011, available

at: www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8ac9d1dc-4279-11e0-8b34-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1v8yz3hYa.8 LRA Crisis Tracker, available at: www.lracrisistracker.com/.9 See Iraq Body Count, available at: www.iraqbodycount.org/database/.

10 At this point, our research agenda includes both killing as well as instances of the creation of conditions thatbring about high levels of dying. However, differences in what numbers represent will be noted.

11 Africa Watch, Evil days: 30 years of war and famine in Ethiopia (New York: Human Rights Watch, Septem-ber 1991), pp. 343–346.

12 Jay Ulfelder and Benjamin Valentino, ‘Assessing risks of state-sponsored mass killing’, February 2008, avail-able at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1703426.

13 Evgeny Finkel and Scott Straus, ‘Macro, meso and micro research on genocide: gains shortcomings and futureareas of inquiry’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2012, pp. 56–67.

14 Benjamin Valentino, Final solutions: mass killing and genocide in the twentieth century (Ithaca and London:Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 3.

15 Reed Wood, ‘Rebel capacity and strategic violence against civilians’, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 47,No. 5, 2010, pp. 601–614; Stathis Kalyvas, The logic of violence in civil war (New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2006); Laia Balcells, ‘Rivalry and revenge: violence against civilians in conventional civilwars’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2, 2010, pp. 291–313; Kristine Eck and LisaHultman, ‘One-sided violence against civilians in war’, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 44, No. 2, 2007,pp. 233–245; Benjamin Valentino, Paul Huth and Dylan Balch-Lindsay, ‘“Draining the sea”: mass killingand guerrilla warfare’, International Organization, Vol. 58, No. 2, 2004, pp. 375–407; Elizabeth Wood,‘Variation in sexual violence during war’, Politics & Society, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2006, pp. 307–341.

16 Kalyvas, The logic of violence.17 Martin Midlarsky, The killing trap: genocide in the twentieth century (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 2005); Martin Shaw, War and genocide (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2003), pp. 59–77.18 Jeffrey Dixon, ‘Emerging consensus: results from the second wave of statistical studies on civil war termin-

ation’, Civil Wars, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2009, pp. 121–136.19 Nicholas Sambanis, ‘What is civil war?’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 48, No. 6, 2004, pp. 814–858,

p. 849.20 Dixon, ‘Emerging consensus’, p. 123.21 We wish to thank the area and issue experts who joined us at a series of seminars, particularly our collaborator

Jens Meierhenrich.22 Valentino, Huth and Balch-Lindsay, “Draining the sea”.23 For a low estimate see Michael Gould, The struggle for modern Nigeria: the Biafran war 1967–1970

(New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012), and for the estimate in tens of thousands see Sam Amadi, ‘Coloniallegacy, elite dissension and the making of genocide: the story of Biafra’, Social Science Research Council,10 January 2007, available at: howgenocidesend.ssrc.org/Amadi.

24 Gould, The struggle for modern Nigeria, p. 47.25 See Alex de Waal, Famine crimes: politics and the disaster relief industry in Africa (Oxford: African Rights

& the International African Institute in association with James Currey, 1997).26 Amadi, ‘Colonial legacy’.27 De Waal, Famine crimes.28 Gould, The struggle for modern Nigeria, p. 106.29 Dominik Schaller, ‘From conquest to genocide: colonial rule in German Southwest Africa and German East

Africa’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, colony, genocide: conquest, occupation and subaltern resistance inworld history (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), pp. 296–324.

30 Schaller, ‘From conquest to genocide’, p. 303.31 Jeremy Sarkin, Germany’s genocide of the Herero: Kaiser Wilhelm II, his general, his settlers, his soldiers

(James Currey, 2011), p. 195.32 Jan-Bart Gewald, ‘Imperial Germany and the Herero of Southern Africa: genocide and the quest for recom-

pense’, in Adam Jones (ed.), Genocide, war crimes and the west: history and complicity (London: Zed Books,2004), p. 61.

33 Gewald, ‘Imperial Germany’, pp. 172–173.

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34 Gewald, ‘Imperial Germany’, pp. 180–181.35 British claims on Germany’s colonies in southwest Africa would later be bolstered by documentation of atro-

cities perpetrated by the Germans against African populations, published in January 1918 as the “Report onthe Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany”.

36 Schaller, ‘From conquest to genocide’, p. 305.37 Gewald, ‘Imperial Germany’, p. 183.38 Gewald, ‘Imperial Germany’, pp. 180–181.39 African Rights, Food and power in Sudan: a critique of humanitarianism (London: James Currey/Indiana,

1997), pp. 202–203.40 Alex de Waal (ed.), Islamism and its enemies in the Horn of Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University

Press, 2004).41 Khamis was transferred in April 1993.42 Susanne Jonas, ‘Guatemala: acts of genocide and scorched-earth counterinsurgency war’, in Samuel Totten

and William S. Parsons (eds.), Century of genocide, 3rd edn. (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 380.43 Jennifer Schirmer, The Guatemalan military project: a violence called democracy (Philadelphia: University

of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 18.44 Schirmer, The Guatemalan military project, p. 44.45 Greg Grandin, ‘Politics by other means: Guatemala’s quiet genocide’, in Etelle Higonnet (ed.), Quiet geno-

cide: Guatemala 1981–1983 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), p. 8.46 Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification, ‘Memory of silence’, in Higonnet, Quiet genocide, sec-

tions 3367 and 3368.47 Jonas, ‘Guatemala’, p. 381.48 Schirmer, The Guatemalan military project, pp. 60–61, p. 28.49 Schirmer, The Guatemalan military project, p. 29.50 Jonas, ‘Guatemala’, p. 26.51 Schirmer, The Guatemalan military project, p. 65.52 Jonas, ‘Guatemala’, p. 384.53 Schirmer, The Guatemalan military project, p. 102.54 Roddy Brett, ‘Racism and the Guatemalan state’, Stockholm Review of Latin American Studies, Vol. 6, 2010,

pp. 43–62.55 Paul R. Gregory, Terror by quota: state security from Lenin to Stalin (an archival study) (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 2009). Gregory notes that many regions requested permission (which they received) toincrease their quotas in order to demonstrate their commitment to Soviet policies (pp. 234–238).

56 Norman Naimark, Stalin’s genocides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 94.57 Gregory, Terror by quota, pp. 14–17.58 Terry Martin, ‘The origin of Soviet ethnic cleansing’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, No. 4, 1998,

pp. 813–861, p. 815.59 Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, A state of nations: empire and nation-making in the age of Lenin and

Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 14.60 Martin, ‘The origin of Soviet ethnic cleansing’, p. 822.61 Michaela Pohl, ‘“It cannot be that our graves will be here”: the survival of Chechen and Ingush deportees in

Kazakhstan, 1944–1957’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2002, pp. 401–430, p. 403.62 Glyn Williams, ‘Commemorating “the deportation” in post-Soviet Chechnya: the role of memorialization and

collective memory in the 1994–1996 and 1999–2000 Russo-Chechen Wars’, History & Memory, Vol. 12,No. 1, 2000, pp. 101–134, p. 108.

63 Pohl, “It cannot be”, pp. 406–407.64 Williams, ‘Commemorating “the deportation”’, p. 115.65 Gregory, Terror by quota, pp. 160–164.66 Samantha Power, ‘A problem from hell’: America and the age of genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002),

p. 440 and p. 507.67 Mirsad Tokaca, Bosnian book of the dead (Sarajevo: Research and Documentation Center, 2013). The

Bosnian book of the dead database was published by the Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo,2005.

68 See Gerald Schneider, Margit Bussmann and Constantin Ruhe, ‘The dynamics of mass killings: testing time-series models of one-sided violence in the Bosnian civil war’, International Interactions: Empirical andTheoretical Research in International Relations, Vol. 38, No. 4, 2012, pp. 443–461; Stefano Costalli andFrancesco Niccolo Moro, ‘Ethnicity and strategy in the Bosnian civil war: explanations for the severity ofviolence in Bosnian municipalities’, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 49, No. 6, 2012, pp. 801–815.

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69 Erik Melander, ‘Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992–1995’, 2007, p. 49, available at: privatewww.essex.ac.uk/�ksg/dscw2007/Melander.pdf.

70 Norman Cigar, ‘Serb war effort and termination of the war’, in Branka Magas and Ivo Zanic (eds.), The war inCroatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina 1991–1995 (New York: Frank Cass Publishers, 2005).

71 This number is from the ‘Preliminary List of People Missing or Killed in Srebrenica’ compiled by the BosnianFederal Commission of Missing Persons (5 June 2005), available at: www.domovina.net/srebrenica/page_006/Preliminarni_spisak_Srebrenica_1995.pdf.

72 Norman Cigar, ‘How wars end: war termination and the Serbian decision-making in the case of Bosnia’, SouthEast European Monitor, Vol. 3, 1996, pp. 3–47.

73 Birger Heldt, ‘Mass atrocities early warning systems: data gathering, data verification and other challenges’,25 March 2012, available at: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id¼2028534.

74 Steven Pinker, The better angels of our nature: why violence has declined (New York: Penguin Group, 2011),p. xvi.

75 See, for instance, Human Security Report 2005, War and peace in the twentieth century (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2005).

Notes on contributors

Bridget Conley-Zilkic is Research Director at the World Peace Foundation(WPF) and Assistant Research Professor at Tufts University’s The FletcherSchool. She is the lead researcher for the WPF project How mass atrocities endand edits the organization’s blog, ‘Reinventing Peace’. Before joining the Foun-dation, she served as research director for the US Holocaust MemorialMuseum s Committee on Conscience. She received a PhD in Comparative Litera-ture from Binghamton University in 2001.

Alex de Waal is Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and Professorat Tufts University’s The Fletcher School. Before joining the Foundation, DeWaal worked as Senior Advisor to the African Union High Level Panel onSudan. He also worked at the Social Science Research Council, where he directeda programme on HIV/AIDS and Social Transformation and on a group of projectson Conflict and Humanitarian Crisis in Africa. De Waal received his DPhil insocial anthropology from Oxford University in 1988.

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