Prevention of genocide is any action that works toward averting future genocides. Genocides take a lot of planning, resources, and involved parties to carry out, they do not just happen instantaneously. Scholars in the field of genocide studies have identified a set of widely agreed upon risk factors that make a country or social group more at risk of carrying out a genocide, which include a wide range of political and cultural factors that create a context in which genocide is more likely, such as political upheaval or regime change, as well as psychological phenomena that can be manipulated and taken advantage of in large groups of people, like conformity and cognitive dissonance. Genocide prevention depends heavily on the knowledge and surveillance of these risk factors, as well as the identification of early warning signs of genocide beginning to occur.
One of the main goals of the United Nations with the passage of the Genocide Convention after the Second World War and the Holocaust is to prevent future genocide from taking place. The Genocide Convention and the responsibility to protect provide the basis for the responsibility of every UN member state to actively prevent genocide and act to stop it in other states when it occurs. However, the United Nations has been heavily criticized for its failure to prevent genocide, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Intervention in genocide can occur at many different stages of the progression of a genocide, but the most ideal stage to intervene is before genocide occurs at all, in the form of prevention known as upstream prevention. Preventing genocide in this way requires a constant and thorough assessment of the risk of genocide around the world at any given time, given the known risk factors, early warning signs, and the knowledge of how a genocide progresses.
The psychological basis of genocide Genocide is not something that only trained, sadistic killers take part in, but rather it is something that ordinary people can do with the proper "training" via cognitive restructuring and social conditioning. The act of killing for genocidal purposes is not a distinct category of human behavior. Instead, genocidal killing demonstrates the potential of ordinary psychological and social processes to be manipulated until they escalate into violence, under certain conditions. One of the major puzzles in studying both the occurrence of and prevention of genocide, therefore, is understanding what makes those "normal" cognitive processes, both on the individual and collective levels, vulnerable to manipulation by outsiders, and which social and political conditions provide a breeding ground for that manipulation to turn violent.
On the individual level, the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance plays a large role in a person's transformation from peaceful citizen to violent genocidal killer. Even more specifically, Alexander Hinton, in his 1996 study on the psycho-social factors that contributed to the Cambodian genocide, coined the term "psychosocial dissonance" to add to this well-known psychological concept other anthropological concepts like cultural models and notions of the self. These forms of dissonance, both cognitive and psychosocial, arise when a person is confronted with behavioral expectations that conflict with their own identity or concept of self, and subsequently work subconsciously to resolve those inconsistencies. Hinton claims that there are a number of cognitive "moves" that must occur in order for a person to reduce psychosocial dissonance felt at the onset of genocide, and these moves slowly transform people into their "genocidal selves". These cognitive moves include the dehumanization of victims, the employment of euphemisms to mask violent deeds, the undergoing of moral restructuring, becoming acclimated to the act of killing, and/or denying responsibility for violent actions. The first move, dehumanization, is one of the biggest "steps", as it has been central to every genocide. In the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, and the Rwandan genocide, as particularly notable examples, victims were labeled as vermin, cockroaches, rats, or snakes, to separate them entirely from the category of human in this process of dehumanization. When the label of "person" is taken away from entire groups of individuals, acting violently towards them, including murdering them, becomes much easier for the average person.
Social psychological factors In addition to individual-level cognitive "moves", there are also many social psychological factors that influence an "ordinary" group's transformation into killers. First, the concept of social cognition explains the ways in which people think about themselves and those around them. People's social cognition is divided into thinking about others as belonging to in-groups and out-groups, which are defined by collective identity and social bonds. Everyone has a bias for their own group called an In-group bias, but this bias only has negative consequences when people simultaneously hold both extremely positive views of themselves and their in-group and extremely negative views of out-groups. People are also generally socialized to avoid conflict and aggression with other members of their own in-group, so one way of overcoming that barrier to violence is to redefine who belongs to each group so that victims of genocide become excluded from the in-group and are no longer protected by this in-group bias.
Social influence and social relations also constitute factors vulnerable to manipulation. Many cultures actively encourage conformity, compliance, and obedience in social relations and can have severe social "penalties" for those that do not adhere to the norms, so that group members can feel an intense pressure to engage in violence if other members are also engaging in it. This tendency for people to conform can be manipulated to induce "thoughtless behavior" in large groups of people at once. Research also shows that this pressure to conform, also known as the "conformity effect", increases when there is an authority figure present in the group, and when certain social and institutional contexts increase people's tendency to conform, like the loss of stability, as people tend to adapt to what is expected of them when stability disappears. Other tendencies of human social relationships can similarly push people towards violence, such as prejudice, altruism, and aggression. It is particularly relevant to understand the link between prejudice and violence, as prejudice is often one of the first starting points in the formation of genocidal behavior. The scapegoat theory (or practice of scapegoating) helps to explain the relationship, as it posits that people have a tendency to lash out on out-groups when they are frustrated, for example in times of political or economic crisis.
Risk factors for genocide
There are a variety of political and cultural factors that make states more at risk for movement down a path of mass violence, and an understanding and recognition of the existence of those factors can be crucial in genocide prevention efforts. While studies in this area find varying degrees of risk for each particular factor, there is widespread consensus on which kinds of environments present the greatest risk for the occurrence of genocide. First, certain situational factors like destabilizing crises and political upheaval make countries more vulnerable to genocide. Forms of political upheaval include civil wars, assassinations, revolutions, coups, defeat in international war, anticolonial rebellions, or any sort of upheaval that results in unconventional regime change or in elites with extremist ideologies coming to power. Almost all genocides of the past half-century have occurred either during or in the immediate aftermath of one of these types of political upheaval.
Political upheaval is particularly dangerous when a repressive leader is able to come to power. Authoritarian leaders can propel entire societies into "monolithic cultures" at risk for genocide by incentivizing a strong obedience to the state, a lack of tolerance for diversity, and creating an environment that facilitates Groupthink and conformity. The most dangerous authoritarian leaders often have extremist views about a new society "purified" of unwanted or threatening groups of people, and they promote these ideologies as moral and for the "greater good" of the nation, as they classify certain threatening groups as barriers to national success. Many such leaders in past genocides, like Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and Slobodan Milošević, have also shared similar personal characteristics, as charismatic, self-confident, intelligent individuals with a fierce desire for power.
In addition to situational political factors like upheaval, authoritarian leaders, and unstable government structures, certain cultural factors also contribute to the likelihood that a state will commit genocide. Cultures that promote the use of aggression as a normative problem-solving skill, and cultures that glorify violence through things like military parades, for example, have a greater risk of perpetrating mass violence. Similarly, societies with a strong history of supremacy ideologies, including the long-term normalization of biases towards outsiders, a lack of acceptance of cultural diversity, and the exclusion of certain groups from society, are also at greater risk. Specifically, Barbara Harff's 2003 model on the antecedents to genocide found that countries with an elite ideology, in which the ruling elite hold an exclusionary vision for the society, are two and half times more likely to commit genocide in the aftermath of a state failure, and genocide is also more than two times as likely in states where the political elite constitutes an ethnic minority. Many versions of these types of extreme ideologies are present in historical examples of genocide, including the "purification" efforts of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and Nazi Germany's pursuit of an exclusively Aryan race in their nation.
Additionally, the potential for genocidal violence increases when multiple forms of crisis, upheaval, or destabilization occur simultaneously, or when the effects of past crises remain unresolved.
Early warning signs of genocide
Gregory Stanton, the founding president of Genocide Watch, formulated a well-known list of ten (originally eight) stages of genocide in 1996. These stages do not necessarily occur linearly or exclusively one at a time, but they provide a guiding model to analyze the processes leading to genocide that can be recognized as warning signs and acted upon, as each stage presents an opportunity for certain prevention measures. Stanton's ten stages include: classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial. The first few of these stages happen early in the process of inciting genocide, and thus offer the most opportunity for preventative measures before genocide is already in full force.
During the Classification stage, where people begin distinguishing within a culture between "us and them" designated by race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality, the most important prevention measure is to promote tolerance and understanding, and to promote the widespread use of classifications and common ground that transcend these harmful divisions. In the Symbolization stage, in which "other" groups are given names or physical symbols to demonstrate their classification, hate symbols, hate speech, and group marking may be outlawed. But such prohibitions are only effective if they are supported by cultural acceptance and social practice.