Toward a Truly Transdisciplinary Study of Genocide

This article addresses the obstructions that genocide educators face in creating a curriculum that has a preventive impact on learners, before proposing an alternative perspective that would transform the way we approach genocide education, magnifying its capacity to contribute to atrocity prevention. It begins by critiquing the disciplinary emphasis that genocide education currently places on history, which reinforces a notion that genocides are phenomena of the past, rather than the present and future. Next, it addresses the assumption that education automatically and inherently contributes to non-recurrence, arguing that real prevention requires a much more intentional and rigorous approach to education. The article then argues for a turn from genocide education to genocide prevention education, which can and should involve a transdisciplinary approach that takes genocide education out of the silo of history education. For genocide education to contribute optimally to prevention, prevention thinking must be integrated both in the pedagogical approach to teaching about genocide and throughout the disciplinary spectrum in which it is taught. To illustrate this, the article offers two examples of new approaches to achieving this goal that have been developed by two atrocity prevention organizations.