The Simon-Skjodt Center’s update to the Tools for Atrocity Prevention resource indicates some advances and continuing gaps in understanding how to use different policy tools to help prevent mass atrocities.
Atrocity prevention practitioners have long called for greater investment in lessons learned efforts. The Simon-Skjodt Center’s new report outlines the challenges to the use of lessons learned and other evidence in atrocity prevention policy making at the US Department of State. It offers specific recommendations to advance priority goals given the strong legal and policy mandates already in place.
As part of our “Lessons Learned in Preventing and Responding to Mass Atrocities” project, the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide interviewed experienced practitioners working on targeted sanctions in the US government to summarize experiential knowledge about the use of targeted sanctions to help prevent mass atrocities.
To help policy makers and researchers seeking to understand the key findings from our Lessons Learned project, we distill and summarize evidence about success factors associated with the effectiveness of atrocity prevention tools.
One strong theme in the new US government’s United States Strategy to Anticipate, Prevent, and Respond to Atrocities is the importance of evaluation, learning, and adaptation. These elements of the strategy reflect the same basic tenets that motivated the Simon-Skjodt Center to conduct the project, “Lessons Learned in Preventing and Responding to Mass Atrocities”—namely, that atrocity prevention efforts should be informed by what has been learned about how to accomplish this goal, and that continued learning is crucial to help address gaps in our current knowledge.
In a new report, From Independence to Civil War: Atrocity Prevention and US Policy Toward South Sudan, Jon Temin, a Visiting Fellow at the Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center, explores how the US might have been more effective in helping prevent or mitigate the civil war and atrocities against civilians.
Find information on historical cases of genocide and other atrocities.