Resilient Societies and Atrocity Prevention

What makes societies resilient against genocide and other mass atrocities? Why is it that risk can escalated in some places, but not in others? These are questions which, until relatively recently, scholars have struggled to answer. And these are questions that I have used to spur my own research. What I am interested in, and what has inspired my work over the last seven or eight years, is the need to understand how and why domestic actors mitigate the kind of risk that we commonly associate with genocide and mass atrocities. Mass atrocities are not inevitable. Most places that contain risk will not go on to experience such violence. However, while we know a lot about risk escalation, we know relatively little about de-escalation