Genocide has received extensive scholarly, policy, and practitioner attention. Missing is the contribution of economists to understand and prevent such atrocities. This book—the first of its kind—assembles contributions by forty-one accomplished scholars to examine economic aspects of genocides, other mass atrocities, and their prevention. The book’s twenty-eight chapters include numerous case studies (e.g., California’s Yana people, Australia’s Aborigines peoples, Stalin’s killing of Ukrainians, Belarus, the Holocaust, Rwanda, DR Congo, Indonesia, Pakistan, Colombia, Mexico’s drug wars, and t ... More

Genocide has received extensive scholarly, policy, and practitioner attention. Missing is the contribution of economists to understand and prevent such atrocities. This book—the first of its kind—assembles contributions by forty-one accomplished scholars to examine economic aspects of genocides, other mass atrocities, and their prevention. The book’s twenty-eight chapters include numerous case studies (e.g., California’s Yana people, Australia’s Aborigines peoples, Stalin’s killing of Ukrainians, Belarus, the Holocaust, Rwanda, DR Congo, Indonesia, Pakistan, Colombia, Mexico’s drug wars, and the targeting of suspects during the Vietnam War); probing literature reviews; novel work based on country-specific datasets; and intriguing perspectives on demographic, gendered, and economic-class aspects of genocides. Replete with research- and policy-relevant findings, new insights are derived from microeconomics, macroeconomics, behavioral economics, law and economics, political economy, development economics, industrial organization, and identity economics. Analytical approaches include constrained optimization theory, game theory, and sophisticated statistical work in data mining, econometrics, and forecasting. A foremost finding of the book concerns atrocity architects’ purposeful, strategic use of violence, including how they manipulate nonrational proclivities among ordinary people to sway their participation in mass murder. Further, the book shows how well-intended prevention efforts can backfire and increase violence, wrong postgenocide design can reinforce exclusion of vulnerable peoples, and businesses can become complicit in genocide. Along with the importance of healthy economic opportunities for genocide prevention, the book shows why new genocide prevention laws and institutions must be based on reformulated incentives that consider insights from law and economics, behavioral economics, and collective action economics.