Greg Stanton, Research Professor in Genocide Studies

Greg Stanton’s life has been devoted to understanding and preventing genocide and other mass atrocities.  He has alternated the settings for his work between academia, the State Department, and non-governmental organizations.  His work has led the way to important advances in the field of international criminal law, and has helped develop the emerging norm of the responsibility to protect.

Greg was a voting rights worker in Mississippi in 1966, and joined the Peace Corps right after graduation from Oberlin in 1968, where he served in Côte d’Ivoire.  He went on to Harvard Divinity School, Yale Law School, and got his MA and Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago, returning to the same village where he had served in the Peace Corps to do his field research.

Greg first saw the aftermath of genocide in Cambodia in 1980 in Cambodia.  He became determined to bring the leaders of the Khmer Rouge to justice for their crimes.  His efforts have finally resulted in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (Khmer Rouge Tribunal), where he still plays an active role as a consultant.

In the State Department in 1994 he was given the job of coordinating US policy on Africa in the UN Security Council, where he wrote the Security Council Resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.  He also formulated his famous “Eight Stages of Genocide” model to help diplomats see the early warning signs of the genocidal process, so they could stop the process before it becomes mass killing.
Greg has concluded that the UN and governments will never have the political will to prevent genocide until a mass movement is built in faith groups and civil society to act at the local level to prevent genocide. Consequently, he founded Genocide Watch and the International Alliance to End Genocide in 1999 with that goal.  Genocide Watch will become part of the Genocide Prevention efforts at ICAR this year.