This week the Simon-Skjodt Center released an updated Tools for Atrocity Prevention website, adding findings from approximately 80 studies published in 2021 and 2022 to the early version covering 1990–2020.
The purpose of the website is to distill policy-relevant knowledge into a practical resource for policy makers, researchers, and students focused on global efforts to help prevent mass atrocities. As policy makers continue to confront new prevention challenges worldwide, the resource aims to aid evidence-informed decisions about how US and global action can better protect civilians facing threats of systematic, group-targeted violence.
The body of research about atrocity prevention tools continues to expand, underscoring the value of regularly-updating our research review. In Figure 1, we summarize the number of studies in our research review, by year—the dotted line indicates the last year covered by our initial analysis released in 2022. The figure shows that the number of studies published each year continues to grow. However, most of that new evidence is indirect: the large majority of new studies included in our review analyzed the effects of policy tools not on mass atrocities, but on what we call “closely-related outcomes,” such as human rights violations and violent conflict.
Figure 1: Number of studies included in Simon-Skjodt Center review of 12 atrocity prevention tools (by year). US Holocaust Memorial Museum
The Tools for Atrocity Prevention website focuses on how to most effectively help prevent mass atrocities—namely, the characteristics of the context in which tools are used (“contextual factors”) and policy decisions about how to design and implement them (“design factors”) that are associated with greater likelihood of success (thus, we refer to these together as “success factors”).
We can evaluate changes in the evidence base around the twelve atrocity prevention tools included in our review by checking whether key findings from our initial review need to be revised after adding the most recent studies.
First, we concluded that the number of studies varied greatly across tools. Figure 2 displays the number of studies about each of the 12 tools. In the 2023 update, the majority of new studies focused on peace operations or mediation, two tools that are already well-examined in the research literature. By contrast, tools such as “naming and shaming,” security assistance, and diplomatic sanctions received relatively little attention from researchers. Significant policy attention to these tools in recent years—especially following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—makes the gap especially notable.
Figure 2: Number of studies included in Simon-Skjodt Center review (by tool). US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Second, we concluded in 2022 that the evidence base around most success factors was small, with the large majority appearing in only one or two studies. In the 2023 update, we again found that the vast majority of success factors were cited in one study. Figure 3 displays the frequency of the number of studies associated with each success factor in the 2023 update.
Figure 3: Distribution of number of studies associated with success factors in Simon-Skjodt Center review. US Holocaust Memorial Museum
There are some indications, however, that the evidence base is changing. Figure 4 displays the 30 largest changes in the number of studies associated with individual factors, sorted by the cumulative number of studies associated with the factor. The gray bars are the number of studies from the initial analysis that we published in July 2022; the orange, the additional studies that we reviewed for the most recent update. If researchers were only devoting attention to the same factors, we would expect to see orange bars cluster around factors associated with a large number of studies, such as the quantity of peacekeeping troops. Instead, Figure 4 indicates that a larger proportion of recent atrocity prevention research has added to the evidence base of under-studied factors. The changes are small, but their breadth suggests some progress from our initial summary.
Figure 4: Changes in number of studies about success factors, 2022 - 2023 (top 30). US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Third, we concluded that a limited number of factors were associated with greater likelihood of success across several atrocity prevention tools. These included strong commitment, international coordination, use of multiple tools, and lack of bias against a particular actor. Based on the 2023 update, we added “domestic cooperation or consent” as a “cross-cutting” success factor. This is likely a result of our decision to combine “domestic cooperation” and “consent”—the latter typically reserved for peacekeeping missions, but conceptually consistent with the idea of cooperation—into a single success factor. We discuss these and other changes to our review process in our methodology update.
Despite some indications of growing evidence, obstacles to summarizing atrocity prevention research remain. Researchers continue to rely on different concepts, different levels of analysis, and different methods to draw conclusions about the factors that influence the effectiveness of atrocity prevention tools. Although these choices may be appropriate for individual studies, they continue to make it difficult to synthesize the full body of relevant evidence. In our initial Executive Summary, we called for a “10-year collaborative research program” to help fill critical gaps in knowledge about atrocity prevention. This first update to the Tools for Atrocity Prevention website demonstrates that this goal is as relevant as ever.