About

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention was founded to fill a gap in the global prevention protocols. We noticed during several trips to northern Iraq in 2016 and 2017 that very little of the work that goes on at high levels of governments, in international organizations, and among large civil society groups ever reaches people facing genocide and mass atrocity, although they are the people for whom all this work is supposed to be done.

 

We built the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention to be responsive and flexible, transparent and judicious, nonpartisan and vocal. We believe that peoples in crisis need immediate action and direct support, even when the international community has its head in the sand.

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We have heard from many survivors that the worst thing about living through genocide was the sense that the rest of the world did not care and had forgotten about them.

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The Lemkin Institute wants to change this dynamic by putting threatened peoples at the center of our concerns.

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We use a transparent system for analyzing crises within a genocide prevention framework and we have created materials so that this system can also be used by others.

 

The Lemkin Institute has grown from the Iraq Project for Genocide Prevention and Accountability, which was launched in 2017 to address the need for long-term capacity building in genocide prevention in Iraq. In the wake of ISIS genocides, we saw an enormous grassroots interest in ending the cycle of violence and promoting a lasting peace.  We are now bringing that work to the global grassroots.