Taking a stand against genocide

A Harpur College professor and a Harpur College alumnus are playing key roles in a Binghamton University initiative aimed at better understanding and disrupting the processes that lead to genocide and mass atrocities.

The Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (I-GMAP) - launched in April 2017 - generates scholarship, educates individuals, and develops courses and curricula on the subject.

Max Pensky, a philosophy professor in Harpur College, serves as the institute’s co-director with Nadia Rubaii ‘85, MA ‘87, PhD ‘91, a professor of public administration in the College of Community and Public Affairs.

“Atrocity prevention is both a domestic and an international obligation,” says Pensky, whose research interests are in the philosophy of law and international relations. “How that obligation is to be met - by whom, with what means and with what prospect of success - is no longer just a problem for politicians and practitioners. It raises deep questions about how we apportion responsibility for protection of vulnerable populations, how far the international community may justly go to discharge such a responsibility, who is authorized to take such preventive measures, how the costs of protection should be fairly shared and how we assess such measures’ effectiveness.”

For Pensky, the institute can help social sciences and the humanities answer some of these questions - and share the answers with a community of practitioners.

“The institute can serve as a common ground for that work to take place,” he says.

Kerry Whigham, the I-GMAP’s postdoctoral fellow for 2018-19, agrees.

“Genocides and other mass atrocities don’t just happen overnight. They are processes that often take years, even decades, to ramp up to the levels of violence typically associated with these crimes,” he says. “If we learn to identify these processes at their earliest stages, we have a much greater chance of stopping them before they escalate into the levels of violence we are seeing today in Syria, Venezuela or Myanmar, for instance.”

Located on the ground floor of Library North, the I-GMAP now includes two doctoral assistants, a postdoctoral fellow, a Binghamton University faculty advisory committee and an external advisory board featuring worldwide leaders in the field, such as Owen Pell ‘80, LLD ‘11.

Pell is president of the board of directors of the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation (AIPR), a nongovernment organization that also works to prevent genocide and mass atrocities. When a fellow member of the institute was looking to fund a university program with similar goals, Pell suggested Binghamton University.

“He [the donor] loves the fact that Binghamton is a state university and believes strongly that Binghamton is the leading state university not only in New York, but one of the leading state universities in the country,” Pell says. “Binghamton can invite faculty members from other state universities for the purpose for propagating ideas like this.”

The donor’s contribution helps support I-GMAP’s first four years.

“I think this institute is a hugely important and tangible contribution being made by the University and is something that you can take to alums and say: ‘If you want to be part of something important, this is that something,’” says Pell, who returned to campus in October 2017 to introduce a talk by former political science professor and genocide scholar Edward Weisband. “The Institute also is centered in the humanities, and that’s very exciting for me. At its core, this is a social science, philosophy, literature and English, and arts and sciences initiative. It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done with the University.”

In and out of the classroom

Pensky and Rubaii have spent the institute’s first year expanding its partnership with the AIPR, establishing relationships with governmental, nongovernmental and educational groups; taking part in workshops and seminars around the world; and welcoming practitioners-in-residence and other experts to campus. In April 2018, I-GMAP held its inaugural annual conference - “Frontiers of Prevention” - at the University Downtown Center.

For students, the institute has developed an interdisciplinary undergraduate minor in genocide and mass atrocity studies and an interdisciplinary graduate certificate in genocide and mass atrocity prevention. A new master’s degree in genocide and mass atrocity prevention is planned, as well. Faculty members will benefit from an I-GMAP grant program that will help them develop genocide and mass atrocity prevention content for courses.

Undergraduates in the minor take a variety of liberal arts classes, such as Essentials of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention.

“We try to bring to the minor, especially for Harpur students, some of the things that they might not have been thinking about before,” Pensky says. “For example, the Geography Department has courses on GIS and remote sensing that turn out to be extremely important for atrocity prevention.”

Meanwhile, I-GMAP is working to bring relevant coursework from other schools to the field. Examples include: software development for predicting atrocity violence with data analysis (Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science); forensic nursing, domestic violence and child abuse (Decker School of Nursing); and corporations’ roles in preventing or contributing to atrocities (School of Management).

The master’s program will include hands-on work with prevention initiatives through a program of externships with global NGOs, foreign politicians and ambassadors.

“Binghamton [University] students are going to see the real world; they’re going to get to see real-world examples of how the field works and how it is developing,” Pell says. “For students, they will have the ability to be out in the world and meet government officials and interview them, shadow them, see how they work, see what they’re doing and see what training looks like.”

A dual benefit

Pensky says I-GMAP is on its way to its goal of being a research institution that can be of assistance both to academic institutions and practitioners.

“We’ve spent the first year listening and paying attention and saying [to academic institutions and NGOs], ‘Is there a need, in your view, for an institution like this?’” Pensky says. “And the answer we got was an overwhelming and resounding, ‘yes’.”

As a result, I-GMAP is providing students with practical experience as well as a fundamental education.

“We want to be a place for Binghamton University students to pursue their course of study in a different way than they might have otherwise,” Pensky says. “They can combine their course of study with some actual practical understanding and experience about how the global prevention movement works.”

That’s important to Whigham.

“Presumably, those of us who have gotten involved in genocide studies aren’t just studying these terrible processes of violence because they are interesting, but rather because we are trying to find a way to ensure they don’t recur,” he says. “Ideally, in the future, genocide studies will become only a discipline for historians.