Credit: Nick Romanenko

Alex Hinton, an international expert on genocide, hopes that the new center will "connect American students to those in Phnom Penh, Buenos Aires, Sarajevo, and Kigali.”

For many Americans, genocide is a horrific calamity, but one that befalls peoples thousands of miles away, with little impact on their own lives. The director of the new Rutgers Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights aims to change that.

“Our goal, in a sense, is to connect American students to those in Phnom Penh, Buenos Aires, Sarajevo, and Kigali,” said Alex Hinton, an internationally known expert on genocide and an associate professor of anthropology and global affairs on the Newark Campus.

During Hinton’s extensive research, including travels to Cambodia to meet with genocide survivors, Hinton has done more than amass cold facts and data about genocide; he also witnessed firsthand its emotional toll. But as he taught courses in genocide over the last several years, he realized, “While students understand the gravity of genocide, they also feel distance from events that, while awful, don’t seem to have direct bearing upon their lives.”

The newly opened center will seek to touch hearts while enlightening minds, through public outreach programs, educational initiatives, and student and faculty exchanges.  Center projects include interdisciplinary staff research, bringing together experts from diverse fields such as political science, law, history, global affairs, sociology, languages, and anthropology; publications; and internships and special projects, such as a model United Nations program for students. A series of lectures and workshops – all open to the public – are scheduled for the spring.

The center is developing a network of international and national collaborations; it already has ties with institutes in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Argentina, and Cambodia, and is developing a relationship with a center in the Ukraine. The center also will rely on a resource unique to the Rutgers–Newark Campus: the main overseas branch of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. The Rutgers center includes a Public Information Room and an invaluable archive of primary Khmer Rouge documents in digital and microfiche form: papers, photographs, films, and other materials that provide a record of the Khmer Rouge–orchestrated genocide.

The center staff, partners, and advisory board – made up of faculty associates and scholars – are drawn from throughout Rutgers as well as numerous other U.S. and international universities and organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, Genocide Watch, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Students will be heavily involved in research programs and other projects.

Hinton believes the center will be a great success “if it helps people understand that the prevention of genocide, hate crimes, and other human rights violations begins here and now, with the decisions we make and the ways that we act.”

High on the priority list are three projects: an effort to develop a human rights literacy initiative for educators that takes a new look at the relationship between human rights and genocide; a local justice program that will explore global concepts of justice and how they relate to local ideas of justice and justice systems; and an examination of how civil resistance, in the form of “people power” movements, can effect beneficial social change.