The Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and Egypt top the list of countries most likely to experience a new mass killing in 2018 or 2019, according to a new forecast released by the Museum's Early Warning Project. The report’s release coincided with the launch of the project’s new website, including interactive data tools, accessible reports, and data files.
The Early Warning Project uses patterns from past instances of mass killing to forecast when new mass killing episodes might happen in the future. At the end of each year we update a list of countries experiencing state- and nonstate-led mass killing. The following report compiles our determinations for onsets of mass killing in 2016 and those cases that we can now judge have ended.
A few days ago, the Monkey Cage Blog ran a guest post by sociologist Amy Austin Holmes that wrestled with the question of why Egyptian security forces perpetrated a massacre in broad daylight at Rabaa a year ago. The Rabaa massacre is just one part of a larger episode of state-led mass killing that began in Egypt after the 2013 coup and continues today. As Holmes describes,
Two recent reports released by Human Rights Watch offer further confirmation of episodes of state-led mass killing in Egypt and South Sudan, beginning in 2013. In our 2013 risk assessments, South Sudan and Egypt were ranked 4th and 6th, respectively, as countries most likely to experience state-led mass killing.
Find information on historical cases of genocide and other atrocities.