Past Projects

Preventing Genocide in America (2018-2022)

Emily Sample, Co-Director
Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Co-Director

Over the last few years, public discourse and a number of events reveal the escalation of a pernicious “us-versus-them” ideology in the U.S., in which calls to restore America’s greatness are increasingly accompanied by language dehumanizing minority groups, including racial, religious and ethnic groups as well as immigrant communities. While conditions vary across the country and for different groups, and protests have generally remained peaceful thus far, the possibility of inter-group violence is not the only concern for the peacebuilding community; the violation of the civil and human rights of vulnerable groups, both minority communities as well as the very poor in general, also present serious threats both to American democracy and core conceptions of justice.

This project brings together practitioners and scholars with the common goal of building an architecture for peace in the United States. We have held workshops in 2018 and 2019, and the books resulting from these workshops have been published with Rowman and Littlefield (above). We will be visiting campus and local communities over the next year to help build our movement for social change.

Public-Private Partnership in Humanitarian Settings Initiative (2018-2022)

Ziad Al Achkar, Project Director

The rising number of natural and man-made disasters over the past decade has put pressure on the existing humanitarian system. Funding mechanism and capacities for humanitarian operators to respond effectively to humanitarian disaster have been stretched to the limit. The need for a new approach has led to the development of public-private partnerships in humanitarian settings. By combining the expertise, knowledge, and capabilities of the two sectors, humanitarian operators can be better prepared to face new challenges in the coming century. As the number of refugees and IDP now represent 1% of the world’s population, these partnerships will prove to be crucial to assist those that have been forcibly displaced. 

The PPP in Humanitarian Settings Initiative at George Mason University seeks to examine the impact of PPPs and identify new opportunities that can be translated into actionable policy and implemented programs on the ground. The initiative focuses on four broad areas of research: innovation, theory and education, law and ethics, and corporate social responsibility. The Initiative evaluates the impact of PPPs, identifies emerging challenges for the sector, and develops training and educational material that can be used to teach the next generation of scholars and practitioners to be better equipped to serve vulnerable populations. 

Based at the Carter School, the initiative serves as a platform to support emerging scholars, researchers, and practitioners in this field. The initiative conducts research on the application of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in the context of PPPs and assesses the impact changing technological and digital innovation has on the sector.  The initiative works to advance research and programs centered on humanitarian practice and teaching. 

The initiative prepares case studies on PPPs & ICT use to highlight best practices, areas of contention, and identify where gaps in the literature and practice exists. The initiative issues thematic papers to highlight emerging trends within the humanitarian sector. As part of the work conducted, the initiative partners with experts from the humanitarian, private, and academic sector to share experiences and identify practical applications to help humanitarian actors better serve the needs of vulnerable populations. 

The initiative is committed to Open-Access Research. All the work and research conducted through this initiative will be public facing to ensure wide spread distribution to serve as a resource to the humanitarian community and improve the science of humanitarian response.  

Objectives

  • Contribute to the literature on humanitarian operations and public-private partnerships

  • Develop educational material focused on teaching humanitarian principles and operations

  • Act as a center for humanitarian research and a hub for new scholars & practitioners

  • Support the development of ethical practices in private-public humanitarian partnerships

Al-Shabaab Ex-Combatants & Perpetrators Research Project (2018-2019)

Christian Taylor, Project Director and Lead Grad Student Investigator
Alexandra McDermott, Project Co-Director
Tanner Semmelrock, Project Co-Director

This project investigates defections from the Al-Shabaab insurgency in Somalia through interviews with former Al-Shabaab combatants.

Published results:

Uyghur Genocide Awareness Campaign (2018-2019)

Arielle Rosenberg, Project Director
Quinton Walsh, Co-director
Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Faculty Supervisor (Through the Office of Student Scholarship, Creative Activities, and Research) 

The Uyghur Genocide Awareness Campaign undertakes two tasks. First, we promote public education, research, and scholarship on the Uyghur genocide in China. Our research on the Uyghur case examines primary sources, including documents and evidence published in internationally respected human rights reports; interviews with survivors, refugees, and displaced peoples conducted by journalists and human rights advocates; and publicly available documents produced by government and international organizations. Our research will be published in appropriate scholarly journals and law reviews. 

 Second, we work to raise awareness amongst the Mason campus community of the ongoing genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of human rights committed against the Uyghur people. Scholars have shown that public awareness campaigns are a critical first step in successful genocide prevention efforts (Jansen, 2017). Our theory of change is that by utilizing in-person and online advocacy techniques, such as tabling on campus and a social media presence, we will be able to produce greater awareness amongst the Mason community of the Uyghur crisis. Because scholars have shown that public awareness is an important factor in determining people’s involvement in and support for anti-genocide social movements (Jansen, 2017), we have decided to conduct a twofold project: 1) a public awareness campaign and, 2) an analysis of the effectiveness of said campaign on inspiring students to participate in civic intervention, such as lobbying their elected representatives. We will produce a final scholarly article in which we synthesize and analyze the results of our research, which we plan to publicly disseminate by presenting our findings at conferences and submitting the paper to a scholarly journal in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies. 

Rwandan Diasporic Project (2017-2019)

Claudine Kuradusenge, Project Director

Diaspora communities hold an important role in the development and implementation of peaceful initiatives as well as the financial support of armed conflicts. Linking at least two countries, they have the political power to promote their social group’s needs while influencing the cultural and political decisions in their homeland. This project explored the evolution of the Rwandan identity within the Diaspora communities as well as the mobilization 'for or against' President Kagame's third term. Rwandans around the world are shaped by a consciousness formed around a trans-generations shift in narratives of identity. In other words, this project is explored the new generations of Rwandans, in diaspora, and reflected on their sense of identity and civil mobilization.

Published results:

Genocide & Atrocity Prevention Graduate Student Study Group (2017-2019)

Sani Zanovic, Project Director

The Genocide & Atrocity Prevention Graduate Student Study Group met to help S-CAR graduate students produce cutting-edge research and writing in the field of Genocide Studies, and to provide a platform for GMU students to pursue creative and inspiring projects that enrich the GMU community. Workshop participants met to discuss and plan student-led activities, and to revise their ongoing writing projects, with the goal of transforming past graduate coursework at S-CAR into outstanding academic journal articles in the field of Genocide Studies; and to share and workshop dissertation chapters. 

Published results:

  • 6 graduate student articles published in peer reviewed journals, and 2 chapters in edited books. See “research” tab above.

Genocide Prevention Network (GPN) (2007-2018)

Sara Saghar Birjanidian, Project Director

The Genocide Prevention Network (GPN) worked to strengthen relationships between genocide prevention scholars and practitioners, policy makers, civil society actors, and communities. Building on the strong relationships established over the last four years in the Great Lakes region of Africa through GMU’s Genocide Prevention Program, GPN identified understudied and underdeveloped entry points for the installment of preventative mechanisms and tools at local, national, and regional levels. GPN functioned at two levels: (1) supporting local partners in Africa’s Great Lakes region to strengthen mass atrocity prevention and (2) producing scholarly research and analysis that will catalyze critical discussions and develop analytic and normative frameworks for prevention in diverse fields of study and practice.

Genocide Prevention in Africa Initiative (GPAI) (2016-1017)

Kofi Goka, Project Director
Chukwuma Onyia, Associate Project Director

This initiative contributed to the study and practice of Genocide Prevention in Africa through scholarly research and publication, including engaged research in African countries.This work focused on studying individual cases of genocide in Africa while paying close attention to the larger political and social dynamics of genocide, across the continent and globally. From this foundation of intimate regional knowledge, combined with the study of global social and political dynamics, GPAI deepened scholarly understanding of how and why genocides take place in particular societies and in the world as a whole, and of the potential for meaningful and responsible action to prevent genocide and promote social reconciliation after genocide.

Corporate Responsibility and Genocide Initiative (CRGI) (2015-2017)

Sarah Federman, Project Director

The Corporate Responsibility and Genocide Initiative (CRGI) built on Sarah Federman’s doctoral research on the French train company's (SNCF) role in the WWII deportations and the ensuing U.S. conflict that exists today fueled by unhappy survivors. The CRGI met to study corporate involvement in genocide and mass atrocities, both historically and in contemporary contexts. The two-fold goal of the initiative was to generate scholarship and a greater awareness of corporate accountability in mass atrocities while building partnerships between victims and survivors, corporations, and global civil society institutions to work towards finding solutions to help corporations serve as productive contributors to global society.

Identity Policies and African Genocide Project (IPAGP) (2015)

Adeeb Yousif, Project Director

Situational identity, where individuals and groups claim political power based on identity, has become a major source of insecurity for people in Sub-Saharan Africa–Countries. Political instability and bloody conflicts and genocide have resulted from these negative forms ethnic identification, tribalism, tribal fanaticism, regionalism, religious intolerance, and tribal agglomeration, resulting in tens or hundreds of dead and wounded victims in the region. The human rights situation in the region continues to deteriorate, and civilians still bear the brunt of human rights violations that are motivated by identity politics—these ideas have psychological effects, narrating differences between the in-group and the out-group, between the us and them, which can lead people to kill each other.