Perceived Mass Atrocities

The Diplometrics Program has built and released databases on international organizations, diplomatic exchanges (embassies), and treaties monitored by the United Nations, including the Country & Organization Leader Travel Database (COLT). The Diplometrics Program has also developed tools to help visualize and structure the data, such as the UN Voting Coincidence Dashboard. This data feeds a research agenda that is interested in measuring and modeling international relations and will inform the International Politics submodule of the International Futures (IFs) model.

The project expects to add to this data collection effort by producing data sets on non-state actors including international non-governmental organizations, multinational corporations, and others.

• Why was PMAD created?

  The risk factors and consequences of atrocities are deeply interconnected with questions of intra- and interstate stability and conflict, economic development, colonialism, and gender equality as well as atrocity crime monitoring and prevention. Built to support the U.S. Congress’s Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018, the Perceived Mass Atrocities Dataset (PMAD) enables the systematic comparison of the occurrence and magnitude of seven atrocity types, in addition to group-perpetrated violence against women and LGBTQIA+ groups, with aggregate atrocities indices for 196 countries from 2018–2022.

• How do you define perceived mass atrocities?

  We define a perceived mass atrocity as an act of violence against 25 or more civilians or otherwise defenseless individuals with the intent of destroying their social, cultural, ethnic, religious, or political group—or intimidating their group by creating a perception of imminent threat to its survival—through systematic or random, planned or unplanned acts by a group of official or unofficial state forces or non-state actors directly or indirectly resulting in death, injury, or widespread damage of property, excluding acts of terrorism that do not involve the pursuit of or threat of group elimination.

• How does PMAD create new research opportunities?

  PMAD offers a foundation for quantitative studies of atrocities as well as more qualitative, process-focused research of lethal and less-lethal violence with its single, divisible framework. The PMAD data highlight several regions where analysis of atrocities using data on only lethal atrocities would be inadequate.