Recent events in Darfur have reminded society that violence committed against a national, religious, racial, or ethnic group continues unabated.  Following the Second World War, the United Nations sought to clarify and define this violence, using the newly coined word ‘Genocide' as its basis.  Further acts of genocide in Cambodia, Srebrenica, and Rwanda were widely recognized but little understood.  Clearly, history has ample evidence of other forms of genocide committed against the Armenians, Ukrainians, Native Americans, and, most notably, the Holocaust in which six million Jews were systematically murdered.  The repeated occurrence of genocide and the violation of fundamental Human Rights makes discussion, investigation, and prevention more difficult and, yet, more crucial.

The Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies takes as its central mission society's need to understand better the social, cultural, political, and economic consequences and implications of these often brutal and oppressive acts of human behavior.  The Center will provide resources for both scholarly exchange and community involvement in order to promote research, education, and dialogue on the human proclivity to divide the world into an ‘us and a them' mentality, objectifying ‘the other' in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender or class that make possible horrific episodes such as the Holocaust, genocide and gross abuses of human rights.  The Center will also share its analysis of emerging conditions that would give rise to violations of rights and motivate contemporary genocidal policies.  This Center will bring together the intellectual resources of faculty and students from multiple departments and from the community to address the social, behavioral, and cultural underpinnings of these pressing topics.