Introduction

This book focuses on what we have learned about the causes and prevention of genocide and mass atrocities in the last half-century. The contributors are members of the Genocide Prevention Advisory Network (GPANet), which we founded in the aftermath of the Stockholm International Forum 2004: Preventing Genocide, convened by the Swedish Foreign Ministry. Our objective: to carry out research and to make our expertise available to governments, international organizations, and NGOs that share our commitment to preventing genocide, “one of the main threats to humanity’s existence, and one that, according to one calculation has cost 169 million lives just between 1900 and 1987” (Bauer 2004: 21).