Genocide scholar to discuss Darfur Nov. 16 at Nebraska Union

Samuel Totten, a genocide scholar based at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, will deliver a lecture about the genocide in Darfur Nov. 16 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Totten's lecture, "The Darfur Genocide: Antecedents, Atrocities, Accountability," will begin at 7 p.m. in the auditorium of the Nebraska Union, 14th and R streets. It is free and open to the public.

In July and August 2004, Totten served as one of 24 investigators on the U.S. State Department's Darfur Atrocities Documentation Project, whose express purpose was to conduct interviews with refugees from Darfur, Sudan, in order to ascertain whether genocide had been perpetrated in Darfur. Based on the data collected by the team of investigators, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared on Sept. 9, 2004, that genocide had been perpetrated by Sudanese government troops and the Janjaweed militia.

Totten has served as the managing editor of a series titled "Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review" (Transaction Publishers) since 2003. Since 2005, he has served as founding co-editor of Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, the official journal of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (University of Toronto Press). In 2008, he served as a Fulbright Scholar at the Centre for Conflict Management at the National University of Rwanda.

Among the books he has co-authored and co-edited on genocide are: "Dictionary of Genocide" (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishers, 2008); "Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts" (New York: Routledge, 2009); and "Genocide in Darfur: Investigating Atrocities in the Sudan" (New York: Routledge, 2006).

Totten is at work on a book on another book on Darfur, "The Unequivocal Genocide in Darfur."

WRITER: Jessica Hustad