GSP affiliates pen op-eds

November 12, 2015

GSP-affiliated faculty Timothy Snyder and David Simon (the Program Director) have each authored an op-ed this week.  Each touches upon a risk of future genocide, albeit in different regions and for different reasons.

Snyder, writing in the New York Times, writes in a piece titled “The Next Genocide” that “Climate change has … brought uncertainties about food supply back to the center of great power politics.”  In turn, some power powers – China and Russia are named specifically – might “turn to a revival of ideas like Lebensraum,” the German war-driving notion that only conquest could secure the arable land necessary to feed the population.

Simon, writing in Newsweek’s Europe edition in a piece titled “Burundi Must Learn the Lessons of Rwanda to Avoid Genocide,”  argues that Burundi’s current crisis bears both similarities and differences to Rwanda circa 1994, but that the biggest question mark may actually be whether the international community has truly internalized the lessons of Rwanda, or whether the new institutions, organizations, and doctrines that have arisen post-Rwanda are toothless gestures.